This Infinite World – Set 10 from the Collection of the Fotomuseum Winterthur

With This Infinite World Fotomuseum Winterthur presented in its anniversary year its tenth Set exhibition, which captures the 20-year history of the museum in a very special way. None other than the New York-based photographer Paul Graham (*1956 in Stafford/GB) was invited to curate this second anniversary exhibition following Concrete – Photography and Architecture. It was with the solo exhibition New Europe by the then less-known British photographer that Fotomuseum Winterthur celebrated its grand opening in 1993. Now the very same Paul Graham, who was recognized for his photographic achievements in 2012 with the prestigious Hasselblad Award, has returned as guest curator with a carte blanche to present his personal artistic perspective on the 4,000 works that comprise the Fotomuseum Winterthur Collection.

With 21 selected works by artists ranging from Diane Arbus to Bertien van Manen, from Lewis Baltz and Luigi Ghirri to Boris Mikhailov, Graham not only examines the creative process behind photographic works, but also questions the position of the photographer in our infinite world: “Painters as well as writers confront a void they have to fill with their efforts, summoning from imagination and recollection faces, dialogue, imagery, characters, and even colors. But photography from the world? It seems sometimes we have the opposite, but equally difficult prospect: the world is so full of matter, so brimming with potentially significant moments, objects, people, land, skies, light – all moving, shifting, second by second – that we are burdened with not an empty page, but an overflowing one.”

The exhibition was curated by Paul Graham and accompanied by the Collection brochure Set 10, as well as an anniversary compilation containing all ten Collection brochures from Set 1 to Set 10.

We would like to thank the BTS / Monterosa Group, the Swiss Re and the Stanley Thomas Johnson Foundation for their generous support.