SHANE LAVALETTE

Still (Noon)

Something the Swiss are not used to experiencing is having their everyday lives documented by an outsider. They are quite comfortable with the world view of Switzerland being the familiar images found on travel postcards of mountain panoramas, shimmering lakes, the iconic fondu pot, and edelweiss. In May 2017, Fotostiftung Schweiz (Swiss Foundation for Photography) took an unusual step and commissioned American photographer Shane Lavalette to follow in the footsteps of Theo Frey, a leading figure in Swiss photojournalism, who eighty years earlier had been commissioned to photograph life in a dozen Swiss villages. Lavalette’s job was to gather a new portrait of the same villages almost a century later. He did so in his vibrant, color images. From soft blades of bromegrass, red blooms of poppies, and gable rooftops to intimate portraits of the local families, he revealed a nuanced view of what the Swiss call home today. Lavalette’s work has appear in the NY Times Magazine and The New Yorker, and exhibited at the High Museum of Art (Atlanta), MFA (Boston), and Aperture Gallery (New York), among others.

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