Ernst Scheidegger

Ernst Scheidegger

Essay
It comes as no sur­prise that the Swiss Con­fed­er­a­tion has awarded the Swiss Grand Award for De­sign to Ernst Schei­deg­ger. Now eighty-eight years of age, he has been in­volved in nu­mer­ous facets of the ap­plied arts all his life. Core, how­ever, was pho­tog­ra­phy. Schei­deg­ger's por­traits of other artists have been pub­lished in­ter­na­tion­ally for decades, par­tic­u­larly those of Al­berto Gi­a­cometti with whom he cul­ti­vated a friend­ship that lasted over twenty years. Today, those im­ages are con­sid­ered icons of artist por­traits.
The pho­tographs he took as a photo jour­nal­ist in India, Afghanistan, Myan­mar, Thai­land and Japan are per­ma­nent fix­tures in our vi­sual mem­ory. For many years, Schei­deg­ger held the po­si­tion of pic­ture ed­i­tor for the week­end sup­ple­ment of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He is also a noted book and ex­hi­bi­tion de­signer, pub­lisher, gallery owner, film au­thor and painter.
His work is char­ac­terised by a strong el­e­ment of cu­rios­ity, though a cer­tain re­serve and a re­spect for oth­ers are equally ap­par­ent. This fea­ture is com­bined with a pro­nounced yet free sense of form. Summed up, this ap­proach im­parts a spe­cific Swiss qual­ity to his work that con­tin­ues to be highly ap­pre­ci­ated nowa­days.