Hans Danuser
Schürzen
Schürzen, 1983
From In Vivo, Portfolio III 1
Gelatin-silver print, 39.8 x 26.9 cm
Collection Fotomuseum Winterthur, gift George Reinhart
1991-001-035
© Hans Danuser
b. 1953 (Chur, CH), lives in Zurich, CH
Hans Danuser’s work operates at the interface between art and science. His involvement with photography began in the 1970s at ETH Zurich, where he carried out experiments with light-sensitive emulsions. His breakthrough as an artist finally came in 1989 when he completed his long-term project In Vivo: he started with a series on nuclear power plants, before photographing, over the space of nine years, a variety of scientific and technological institutions that he regarded as symbolic centres of power and places where social debates crystallised. The cycle of images comprises 93 photographs taken in pathology centres, pharmaceutical companies, laboratories, gold foundries and other institutions that are typically hard to gain access to. Danuser’s black-and-white photographs only refer incidentally to concrete spaces; his abstract, high-contrast compositions instead convey an atmosphere that is, on occasion, uncanny. Subsequent groups of work focused more on the effects of climate change on landscapes, as was the case in Erosion, the series that Danuser created between 2000 and 2006 as an installation that allowed viewers to walk through close-up images of eroding rock laid out on the floor.