Christian Vogt - Today I've been you

Since the late 1960s Christian Vogt has produced a photographic oeuvre impressive for its creative inventiveness and its unexpected twists. He is a master of the art of photographic haikus, and a virtuoso of associative story telling with pictures. To Vogt, photography is never a mere reproduction but always a speculation about the meaning or the story hidden behind the surface, a reflection on the subjectivity of the photographic eye, in the awareness that the actual picture only emerges through the perception of the beholder. Today I've been you combines Vogt's "Photographic Notes", a photographic diary started in 1981, with more recent series of large-format photographs: "Flaxen Diary", "Nebelbilder" (both 2003-2009), "Naturraume" (2008/09), and the image/text work "Skinprints" (2008/09). In this latest series the text becomes the picture while the skin on which it is imprinted turns into an existential background for questions such as "Am I what I think others think I am". The catalogue Christian Vogt, Today I've been you was published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at the Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, 24 October 2009 to 14 February 2010.