Exhibition: ‘Ernst A. Heiniger – Good Morning, World!’ at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zürich

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 10th October 2021

Curators: Teresa Gruber and Katharina Rippstein

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
“Bjesprisorni”, Sleeping boy in Leningrad
1932
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

An end of week posting before the exhibition closes.

Ernst A. Heiniger seems to have been a man of much learning and creativity … a polymath.

He belonged to the avant-garde of the Swiss “New Photography” movement in the 1930s; he was a retoucher by trade who taught himself the art of photography. He created one of the first photobooks in Switzerland; he created innovative designs combining photography and graphic design, photo | graphic design, “an entirely novel concept at the time.” He made posters. He started shooting short black and white promotional and documentary films. He taught himself the wide format of Cinemascope and Technicolor film – “previously untested creative tools for Heiniger” – and was hired by Walt Disney to shoot his “edutainment” films all over the world. He was commissioned to produce a 360 degree film for Expo 64 in Lausanne and produced the oldest panorama shots in Switzerland (see video below), and then went on to develop his own 360 degree recording and projection technology in 1965, which was ready for use under the name “Swissorama” at the beginning of the 1980s (see images and film below).

What an artist, what creativity, intelligence and drive. Was there nothing this man couldn’t do!

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thankx to Fotostiftung Schweiz for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Bahnhofplatz, Zurich
1933
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Jumping over a crevasse, Bernese Oberland
1933
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Grey and Brown, Puszta (Hungary)
1936
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
White wine star
1939
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Rope team on the Bianco ridge, Grisons
1941
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Fitting
1942
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Water drop
1943
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (1909-1993) belonged to the avant-garde of the Swiss “New Photography” movement in the 1930s. A photo retoucher by trade, he taught himself the art of photography autodidactically. He quickly developed a keen sense for contemporary and modern aesthetics and soon became one of the first photographers to be admitted to the Swiss Werkbund (SWB). After this initial spark to his career, Heiniger constantly took on new challenges and continued to do pioneering work. In 1936 he created Puszta-Pferde (“Horses in Hungary”), one of the first modern photobooks in Switzerland. He worked with well-known graphic artists such as Heiri Steiner, Herbert Matter and Josef Müller-Brockmann and created innovative designs by combining photography and graphic design, an entirely novel concept at the time. In the 1950s, Heiniger travelled the world as a documentary filmmaker for Walt Disney – two of his short films were awarded an Oscar. He later created Switzerland’s first 360 degree film for Expo 64 in Lausanne.

Even though Ernst A. Heiniger’s visual worlds were admired by a broad public in his day, his name is still largely absent from the canon of Swiss photographic history. In 1986, he left Switzerland determined never to return and lived in Los Angeles until his death in 1993. Since then, the Fotostiftung Schweiz has sought to return his photographic estate to Switzerland – which it finally accomplished in 2014. The exploration and processing of his archive provide the basis for the first comprehensive retrospective of this creative visual designer. The exhibition Ernst A. Heiniger – Good Morning, World! shows object and nature photographs, photobooks, posters, films, making-of pictures and documentaries that situate his work within the history of photography. His 360 degree film Rund um Rad und Schiene (“Magic of the Rails”) – the SBB’s attraction at Expo 64 in Lausanne – has been recreated as an all-around projection. Ernst A. Heiniger’s diverse photographic and cinematic oeuvre was always at the cutting edge of technology and oscillates between cool perfection and sensual closeness to nature.

New Photography and the Swiss Werkbund

In 1929, at the age of twenty, Ernst A. Heiniger set up his own business as a positive retoucher. In the same year, the exhibition Film und Foto (FiFo) by the German Werkbund took place at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich. The title of the exhibition was to be emblematic of Heiniger’s further career, as the two camera-based media, film and photography, defined his entire artistic output. At the time, the international touring exhibition was considered a manifesto for a modern visual aesthetic. The terms “Neues Sehen” (New Vision) and “Neue Sachlichkeit” (New Objectivity) were used to describe those avant-garde tendencies that emphasised genuinely photographic means of design. The characteristics of the new aesthetic included sharpness of image, attention to detail, unusual perspectives such as high and low angle shots, (abstracting) close-ups or multiple exposures. The precise capture of structures and forms was also one of the typical qualities of this “New Photography”, as it became known in Switzerland. After only a short period as a self-employed retoucher, Ernst A. Heiniger decided to learn how to take photographs himself. He made his customers an offer: for the same price, they would receive a new, better photograph instead of a retouched one. Inspired by visits to exhibitions and publications such as Werner Gräff’s Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (“Here Comes the New Photographer”, 1929), he adapted the aesthetics of the international avant-garde and became one of the pioneers of New Photography in Switzerland. His achievements as a photographer did not go unnoticed by the Swiss Werkbund (SWB), which campaigned for the advancement of “New Photography in Switzerland” and organised an exhibition with this title in 1932. Heiniger was represented with several pictures at the exhibition and was one of the first photographers to be admitted to the SWB Zurich in 1933.

Ernst A. Heiniger book covers

Photobooks

In 1936, Ernst A. Heiniger ventured into a new medium – the photobook. For his first essayistic photobook Puszta-Pferde (“Horses in Hungary”), he travelled to Hungary to take pictures of the wild horses of the Pannonian Steppe over the course of several weeks. While designing the book, he experimented freely with his photographic material and composed lively and varied photo pages. In 1937, the book was published in high-quality rotogravure by the Zurich publishing house Fretz & Wasmuth. With a total (German) print run of 23,000 copies, it was a great success and showed for the first time that Ernst A. Heiniger was not merely an aloof representative of avant-garde photography, but also had a talent for inspiring a wider audience with his pictures.

Heiniger was able to build on this success with his next two books Tessin (“Ticino”, 1941) and Viertausender (“Four-Thousanders”, 1942). Both were produced during the Second World War against the backdrop of closed borders and a revival of sentimental homeland imagery. In the context of “spiritual national defence”, the “Heimatbuch”, a genre of books painting an idealised image of Alpine nature and culture, was encouraged by the authorities as a means to inspire the moral uplift of a beleaguered nation. For Heiniger, however, high alpine landscape photography was also a fresh opportunity to translate a subject he was passionate about into book form. The overly romantic transfiguration of the local landscape was kept in check by the fact that he remained true to his detached, objective style. With a firm belief in the documentary power of photography, he wanted to convey the experience that was revealed to the alpinist upon reaching a mountain peak. The many enthusiastic book reviews give an indication of the entertaining, escapist potential of his books in an age when a destructive war was raging outside Switzerland’s borders.

Heiri Steiner (Swiss, 1906-1983) (designer)
Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993) (photographer)
Grindewald poster
1935

Heiri Steiner (Swiss, 1906-1983) (designer)
Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993) (photographer)
Bally Shoes poster
1936

Installation view of the exhibition Ernst A. Heiniger – Good Morning, World!’ at Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur, Zürich showing at right, Telefon poster (1942)

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Telefon poster
1942
Poster
128 x 90.5cm (50.4 x 35.6 in.)

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
World Exhibition of Photography Lucerne poster
1952

Photo|graphic design

The medium of photography experienced a boom in the 1930s in the form of printed images. The quality standards of the printing trade were high in Switzerland, and photography was increasingly used for magazine illustrations, poster designs and commercial art. Important innovators in typography and graphic design such as Max Bill, Anton Stankowski or Jan Tschichold resided in Zurich; Ernst A. Heiniger worked in a creative and innovative environment. Under the terms “Fotografik” or “Typofoto”, photography entered into a new kind of combination with graphic and typographic elements. The progressive, neo-objective aesthetics of New Photography was ideally suited to applications in the field of advertising. Heiniger supplied images for well-known graphic artists such as Herbert Matter, Richard Paul Lohse and Josef Müller-Brockmann and also practised graphic design himself. From 1934 to 1939, he managed a studio for photography and graphic art on St. Annagasse in Zurich together with Heiri Steiner. As a duo with Steiner, and later as a solo artist, he designed visionary posters that still have a timeless and modern effect today.

Ernst A. Heiniger Das Buch vom Telephon book cover

“Pro Telephon” and first films

After parting company with Heiri Steiner, Ernst A. Heiniger was fortunate to have the opportunity to work for a loyal client that was open to modern advertising. The Swiss telecommunications company PTT had launched a campaign in 1927 to popularise the telephone in Switzerland. Heiniger worked for them as a photographer and graphic designer throughout the war and beyond. From 1942, he also started making his first short promotional films for “Pro Telephon”, and in 1946 he was behind the camera for the 20-minute documentary Sül Bernina (CH, 1948). The film uses impressive scenes and modernist imagery to show how the heavy telephone cable was joined together from the north and south at the Bernina Pass to replace the telephone poles that were susceptible to interference.

Ernst A. Heiniger World Exhibition of Photography 1952 Lucern, Switzerland catalogue

The World Exhibition of Photography in Lucerne

The year 1952 marked a turning point in Heiniger’s life and career. The World Exhibition of Photography was held in Lucerne – a universally oriented exhibition that aimed to show the medium’s areas of application as comprehensively as possible. Heiniger was involved in the major event in various capacities: as a graphic designer, he won the competition for the poster design, and as an expert in the field of object photography, he was entrusted with the curatorial task of organising the “Sachwiedergabe” (“object reproduction”) section. His own pictures were omnipresent at the exhibition. A prominent visitor recognised Heiniger’s talent, and in the summer of 1952 he and Walt Disney met for the first time at the Hotel Palace in Lucerne. Disney cut right to the chase and offered Heiniger a job as a cameraman for his planned documentary film about Switzerland. While working with the American media company, Ernst A. Heiniger met his future wife Jean Feaster. After their marriage in 1953, the two became an inseparable team, not only in private but also professionally.

Ernst A. Heiniger Masterpieces of Photography 1952

Masterpieces

In addition to the platform offered to Ernst A. Heiniger at the Lucerne exhibition, he produced an illustrated book in the same year to draw attention to his photographic work. He edited a portfolio of sorts comprising 52 of his best independent and applied works that he had produced since the 1930s. The publication appeared in two languages; he called the German edition Das Jahr des Fotografen (“The Year of the Photographer”). On each double-page spread he arranged two pictures that are characterised by contrasts in form or content, but have something in common in their juxtaposition, which the lyricist Albert Ehrismann pondered in the captions. The English edition contains picture commentary by the British writer R.A. Langford and bears the self-confident title Masterpieces of Photography. The estate includes almost all the original prints of these Masterpieces, which were used as print templates at the time. The objects laminated on photo mounting board form the core of the exhibition and provide an insight into Heiniger’s appraisal of his own work as the focus of his activity began to shift from the static to the moving image.

Films for Walt Disney

In the early 1950s, Walt Disney launched the documentary film series People & Places for the supporting programme of his animated films – an anthology of half-hour short films designed to introduce foreign countries and peoples to American audiences. One of these countries was Switzerland. While searching for a suitable cameraman, Disney became aware of Ernst A. Heiniger. Switzerland (CH, 1955) was to be the third film in the series and also the first to be shot in Cinemascope. The pronounced wide format of Cinemascope and Technicolor film were new, previously untested creative tools for Heiniger. But he never shied away from a challenge and quickly learned to work with the format and colour, and so he was immediately rehired for further films by Walt Disney Productions. From 1955 to 1957, Jean and Ernst A. Heiniger travelled extensively in Asia. They shot two new People & Places films in Japan: Ama Girls (USA, 1958) follows the lives of a fishing family from Inatori with a special focus on the unusual profession of the 18-year-old daughter, who earns her living as a seaweed diver. For the second film Japan (USA, 1960), the Heinigers documented Japanese festivals, traditional crafts and a Shinto wedding. Disney’s so-called “edutainment” films were designed to inform and entertain a broad cinema audience. Although Walt Disney gave the camera teams travelling all over the world for him a great deal of creative freedom, the films were eventually edited according to commercial criteria under the supervision of his producer Ben Sharpsteen. In 1958, the Heinigers spent another whole year in the Colorado River area for the film project Grand Canyon (USA, 1958), a film adaptation of the extremely popular suite of the same name by the composer Ferde Grofé. The short film was shown in 1959 as a supporting film for Sleeping Beauty. In the same year, the two films Ama Girls and Grand Canyon both won an Academy Award (“Oscar”) – one for Best Documentary (Short Subject), the other for Best Live Action Short Film.

The Ernst A. Heiniger Archive contains numerous slides that document the filming of Disney productions or can also be described as stills. The films Ama Girls, Japan, Grand Canyon and the German version of Switzerland were made available for viewing thanks to digital copies from film archives and are also part of the exhibition.

360 degree cinema

After film was plunged into crisis by the spread of television, the industry steadily introduced new film formats to enhance the viewing experience at the cinema. Following the various widescreen formats, Disney’s patented “Circarama” technology set new standards in the 1950s. The system, consisting of a camera and projection display, enabled the capture and reproduction of a full 360 degree angle. In the early 1960s, Ernst A. Heiniger was commissioned by the SBB to produce a 360 degree film for Expo 64 in Lausanne. He was not only responsible for the production, cinematography and direction of the project, but also developed the script for Rund um Rad und Schiene (“Magic of the Rails”, CH, 1964) in cooperation with the client. The 20-minute film was shown every half hour at the Expo in a round auditorium with a diameter of 26.5 metres and a capacity of 1500 people. Around 4 million people had seen the film by the end of the Expo. The Fotostiftung Schweiz is showing this first Swiss 360-degree film, which was restored and digitised in 2014 as part of a Memoriav project, on a smaller scale as a walk-in circular projection.

Despite the success of Magic of the Rails, Heiniger was only partially satisfied with the result; he was bothered by the technical shortcomings of the Circarama system, which did not allow seamless projection. He therefore began developing his own 360 degree recording and projection technology in 1965, which was ready for use under the name “Swissorama” at the beginning of the 1980s. From 1982 to 1984, he used his system to produce the film Impressions of Switzerland (CH, 1984), a total image of Switzerland, which was shown continuously from 1984 to 2002 at the Museum of Transport in Lucerne in a custom-built auditorium.

The exhibition was curated by Teresa Gruber and Katharina Rippstein. The publication Ernst A. Heiniger – Good Morning, World! accompanying the exhibition is available from Scheidegger & Spiess. The Ernst A. Heiniger Archive, which is maintained by the Fotostiftung Schweiz, has been comprehensively indexed and digitised and is accessible to the public via an online database: fss.e-pics.ethz.ch.

Press release from the Fotostiftung Schweiz website

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Poster “so telephonieren”
1950
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Self-portrait
around 1950
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Ernst A. Heiniger and his wife Jean were inseparable: here they traveled to Japan for a Cinemascope film
around 1956
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Seaweed diver, film scene from ‘Ama Girls’ (USA, 1958)
around 1956
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

A day’s trip west of Tokyo, Ernst A. Heiniger found a place that he imagined: the archaic-looking fishing village of Inatori. He selected a few villagers, arranged them into a family and let them play their “authentic” everyday life. Yukiko – an 18-year-old hairdresser in real life – is one of those divers with special skills in the film. They stay under water for minutes to harvest the coveted seaweed.

The 30-minute film “Ama Girls” won an Oscar in 1959 and spurred Heiniger’s further career. Numerous photographs were taken on the set between filming, such as this shot of the alleged diver who had just emerged from the sea. As a kind of mermaid, she embodies a phantasm: beautiful, mysterious, exotic and aloof.

Fotostiftung Schweiz. “Die Bildkritik – Perlen der Fotostiftung Schweiz,” on the NZZ website 8/9/2021 [Online] Cited 13/09/2021. Translated from the German.

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Women at a festival, Japan
around 1956
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Jean and Ernst A. Heiniger during the shooting of the Cinemasope film “Grand Canyon” (USA, 1958)
1958
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Ernst A. Heiniger (Swiss, 1909-1993)
Ernst A. Heiniger with his wife Jean while shooting a Cinemascope film
Nd
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Karl Wolf
Shooting of the Circarama film “Rund um Rad und Schiene”
1963
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

Echorama in 360°: Eine Schweizer Zeitreise in die 60er-Jahre und zurück
Echorama in 360 °: A Swiss journey through time to the 1960s and back

The oldest panorama shots in Switzerland come from the film “All about wheel and rail” by Ernst A. Heiniger. The recordings amazed the visitors of Expo 64. Discover scenes from the crowd puller here: take a look around Bern’s old town, a dining car with neatly dressed people or a construction site from the 1960s. Recordings from the present also show how cityscapes, technologies and worldviews have changed. With headphones you can dive deeper into the pictures, which are underlaid with news articles from the respective time.

Karl Wolf
The 9-camera system on Heiniger’s Chevrolet: the filmmaker worked hard for the Expo film
around 1963
© Fotostiftung Schweiz

The 9-camera system outdoors

Vicky Schoch
Ernst A. Heiniger showed Walt Disney the site of Expo 64. The two were close friends
1964
SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen

The 360 pioneer

Heiniger, who had a passion for technology, was very much involved in the development of Disney’s “Circarama” system. Creating a circular movie theatre that screened 360° films became one of his dreams. He was able to realise this dream when the Swiss Federal Railways commissioned him to shoot a movie in this format for the Expo 64 in Lausanne. The film All About Wheels and Rails was a huge success. It is allegedly one of Switzerland’s most watched films with almost four million viewers.

Heiniger continued to develop the 360° technology until the end of the 1980s when he launched “Swissorama”, a new-and-improved cylindrical 360° film system. Europeans were sceptical of the system, and when Heiniger moved to Los Angeles with his wife in 1986, he sold it to a US company which marketed it under the new name “Imagine 360”.

His last wide-screen film, Destination Berlin, was due to be screened in a dome cinema near West Berlin’s tourist district, the Ku’damm, but historic events shuttered his project. With German reunification, half of the city, namely East Berlin, was missing from the movie. Audiences stayed away and the film never reached the expected success.

Heiniger’s death

The money he made with the sale of “Swissorama” enabled him to buy a house in the Hollywood Hills, where he lived for the remainder of his life. His death in 1993 went unnoticed in Switzerland where he is still relatively unknown, even though several exhibitions and events have been dedicated to him.

In 1997 the newly established Swiss Photo Foundation organised an exhibition of his work at the Zurich Art Museum, and one of his wide-screen films was shown at the Transportation Museum in Lucerne until 2002. When the Swissorama closed that year, this kind of film disappeared, dashing his dream of creating a worldwide network of 360° cinemas.

Anonymous. “On the trail of photographer and Oscar winner Ernst A. Heiniger,” on the Swissinfo website August 2, 2021 [Online] Cited 13/09/2021.

Books

Puszta horses (Zurich 1936)
The Photo Book of the National Exhibition (Zurich 1939)
Ticino (Zurich 1941)
Four-thousanders. A picture book of the beauty of our Alps (Zurich 1942)
The Year of the Photographer (Zurich 1952)
Grand Canyon, nature and wildlife in 157 colour photos. Kümmerly & Frey Geographischer Verlag, Bern 1971
The Great Book of Jewels (Lausanne 1974)