To celebrate the centenary of Sabine Weiss’ birth, Photo Elysée is putting on a show in tribute to the photographer who died in 2021. The museum will unveil various treasures from among the 200,000 negatives and 7,000 contact sheets in the collection received in 2017.  

Sabine Weiss was a major figure in humanist photography, a movement born in France after the Second World War. Throughout her career, the photographer was driven by an insatiable curiosity about others, whether in France where she settled in 1946 or during her many trips across Europe, the United States and Asia, where she continued to travel until the end of her life.  

Photo Elysée has one of the world’s largest collections devoted to photography. It spans the entire history of the medium, from its invention in the 19th century to digital technologies. At Photo Elysée, Sabine Weiss joins other great names from the world of photography such as René Burri, Leonard Freed, Henriette Grindat, Monique Jacot, Lehnert & Landrock and Ella Maillart. 

Photo Elysée is presenting a major exhibition devoted to one of Japan’s greatest photographers. This retrospective, produced by the Instituto Moreira Salles (Sao Paulo, Brazil), will be making a stopover in Switzerland after showing in Berlin and London. 

During the sixty years of his career, Daido Moriyama (born in Osaka in 1938) definitively altered our perception of photography. He used his camera to document his immediate surroundings and to visually explore post-war society in Japan. But he also challenged the very nature of photography itself.  

His incomparable visual language is as highly acclaimed as his numerous publications, which are at the heart of his work. 

Right from the start, viewers have been captivated by Moriyama’s photographic subjects, from the mass media and advertising to society’s taboos and the theatricality of everyday life. He captured the clash between Japanese tradition and the accelerated westernisation that followed the US military occupation of Japan after the end of the Second World War. Inspired by American artists such as Andy Warhol and William Klein, the photographer brought Japan’s nascent consumer society to life. He explored the reproducibility of images, their dissemination and their consumption. Moriyama repeatedly positioned his archive of images in new contexts, playing with enlargements, cropping and image resolution. Even today, his pioneering artistic spirit and visual intensity remain innovative. 

« Come and see here what you won’t see elsewhere! » is the slogan for the permanent exhibition, laid out chronologically over two floors to showcase treasures from Vaud’s art collections, with some three hundred works dating from the eighteenth century to the present day.

With the help of unpublished archives held by the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIK-ISEA), the exhibition spotlights the life and work of the Lausanne sculptor André Tommasini. (1931-2011).

Home & Away is a photographic installation based on the collection of The Anonymous Project. Collecting color slides from the last 70 years, The Anonymous Project preserves this collective memory. In his installations, Lee Shulman gives a second life to the often forgotten people in these moments captured in Kodachrome color.

Designed for L’Atelier de Photo Elysée, Home & Away invites visitors to settle into an interior inspired by the great years of the slide.

Olga Cafiero has been given carte blanche to explore the Naturéum’s collections. Through her photographic series, she captures the perpetual accumulation of time. She plays with colors and materials to create and represent each object. By bringing zoological, botanical and geological specimens to life, she opens up new perspectives on the natural sciences.

Olga Cafiero takes over Plateforme 10’s Le Signal L space at the suggestion of Photo Elysée and Naturéum.

“Set and setting” presents the first institutional solo show of Swiss artist Tamara Janes. Janes is fascinated by how we see, question, and change the post-modern conditions of the image. She addresses these issues by utilising a unique blend of high-culture and popular culture sources that captivate audiences and humorously expose both profound and mundane aspects of contemporary visual culture. A large part of the exhibition shows bodies of work she made after researching the New York Public Library Picture Collection in 2018. It acts as a source of images for her, which she later organizes, adjusts, recontextualizes and modifies based on her artistic preferences.