How One Woman Led The Charge In Celebrating Photography In Switzerland

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Rosellina Burri-Bischof dedicated her life to promoting photography in Switzerland. Her contemporaries remember her as a great networker, a beautiful woman with a black lion's mane, and a charismatic philanthropist.

She was a very empathetic person and a lobbyist for photography, says Rolf Sachsse, photographer and professor emeritus at the Saar College of Fine Arts in Germany.

In the October 1974 issue of the Swiss cultural magazine Du, the then editor-in-chief Manuel Gasser wrote:“Ms. Rosellina Burri-Bischof was the first person to recognise the need for an institution to actively promote the interests of photography. She became the driving force behind its establishment.”

In the international photography magazine Camera, the journalist and writer Hugo Loetscher declared that it was not he, but Rosellina Burri-Bischof, who had created the Swiss Foundation for Photography today's Fotostiftung Schweiz. Yet by the time the foundation officially came into being in 1971, Burri-Bischof had already been working with heart and soul for two decades to promote photography in Switzerland.

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  Werner Bischof: Rosellina Mandel with children on the beach in Rimini, 1947 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos
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  Rosellina Bischof, photographic equipment of Werner Bischof, Tokyo, 1952 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos
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  Werner Bischof: Rosellina Bischof in Japan, 1952 © Werner Bischof Estate / Magnum Photos
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  Rosellina Bischof at home dressing her son Daniel. The picture is part of Serge Stauffer's final project in the photography class of the Zurich School of Applied Arts, 1955 Serge Stauffer/Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, ZHdK/Archiv
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  Rosellina Bischof at home showing chopsticks and a Japanese fan to her older son Marco. The picture is part of Serge Stauffer's final project in the photography class of the Zurich School of Applied Arts, 1955 Serge Stauffer/Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, ZHdK/Archiv
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  Rosellina Bischof photographed by René Burri in Zurich in 1956. In the background, one of Werner Bischof's most famous pictures, the flute player on his way to Cuzco. © Rene Burri/Magnum Photos
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  Rosellina Bischof stands next to Henri Cartier-Bresson photographing a frozen landscape of the Seine. France, 1956 © Rene Burri / Magnum Photos
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  The picture for the annual meeting of Magnum Photos. Foreground: Inge Bondi, John Morris, Barbara Miller, Cornell Capa, René Burri, Erich Lessing. Middle: Michel Chevalier Background: Elliot Erwitt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Erich Hartmann, Rosellina Bischof, Inge Morath, Kryn Taconis, Ernst Haas and Brian Brake, Paris, 1957 © Magnum Photos/Magnum Collection
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  Members of the Board of Trustees of the Foundation for Photography Switzerland on the occasion of the Benefactors' Association in March 1983. From left to right: Verena Bär-Deucher, Rosellina Burri-Bischof, Allan Porter, Hans Bolliger, President Charles-Henri Favrod, Walter Binder, Carlo von Castelberg and David Streiff. Keystone / Niklaus Stauss

The only child of a Hungarian-Jewish emigrant couple, Moses and Anna Mandel, Burri-Bischof was born in Zurich on June 5, 1925. After training as a kindergarten teacher, she worked in Rimini, Italy, from 1946, where she looked after war-traumatised orphans at the Italo-Swiss education centre (Centro Educativo Italo-Svizzero). There she met and fell in love with Swiss photographer Werner Bischof, who was preparing a report on the centre's work. Back then she was still called Rosa Mandel, although her friends called her Rösli. To the Italians she was Rosellina.

The couple were married in May 1949 and, according to their eldest son, Marco Bischof, his mother immediately started working in the“back office”. She saw to all the administrative aspects of her husband's photographic work and accompanied him on trips to Europe, Asia, Japan, the United States and Mexico.

On May 16, 1954, Werner Bischof was killed in a tragic accident, when the vehicle he was travelling in plunged into a ravine in the Peruvian Andes. A geologist and the driver also lost their lives.

News of the death of the renowned photographer – who was a member of the still young agency Magnum Photos – spread like wildfire in Zurich, where it was met with grief and shock. The road they were travelling on was“no better and no worse than any other road in that region”, Gasser wrote in his biography of Werner Bischof, in accompaniment to the photo book A Photographer's Odyssey, published by Rosellina Bischof in 1957.

When Werner Bischof died, his wife was heavily pregnant with their second son, Daniel, who was born nine days after the accident. Now a widow and single mother of two sons, Rosellina Bischof devoted herself to managing her husband's valuable trove of images.

In autumn 1954, she organised a vernissage to celebrate the launch of the photo book Japan as well as a travelling exhibition. Two years later, she became the director of Magnum Photos in Switzerland. The agency was a cooperative in structure and committed to socially critical, humanistic photography.

In 1956, Rosellina Bischof, together with the Parisian publisher Robert Delpire, persuaded the Kunstgewerbemuseum (the Museum of Decorative Arts, now the Museum of Design) in Zurich to hold an exhibition on Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1957, she launched a travelling exhibition of the photographs of Werner Bischof, in cooperation with the same museum. In 1961, she showcased war photographs by Robert Capa, which she managed to bring over from New York.

With these three presentations of top-class photographs, Burri-Bischof deepened the Swiss public's understanding of photography as an art form; it was a real“school of seeing”. And this was just the beginning.

The photo exhibition The Family of Man, curated by star photographer Edward Steichen, opened in New York in 1955 and was hosted by the Kunstgewerbemuseum in Zurich in 1958. Steichen was an important role model for Burri-Bischof. From 1947, he had directed the substantial photography department of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), which had already been collecting photography on a par with all other arts since the early 1930s.

At the time, few people in Switzerland had thought of collecting photographs professionally, although the photographic medium was present at the highest level. Thus, the Swiss-published international monthly review of photography and film, Camera, was sold by subscription around the globe.

The photography teacher Hans Finsler was legendary: together with Alfred Willimann, he trained scores of photographers, many of whom went on to become famous – among them were Werner Bischof, Ernst Scheidegger and René Burri. Arnold Kübler was also a great promoter of photojournalism in Switzerland, supporting and encouraging Paul Senn and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, for instance.

In 1963, Rosellina Bischof married the Magnum photographer René Burri. Their union produced two children, Yasmine and Olivier. Burri-Bischof maintained friendly relations with the Magnum agency, the Center of Photography in New York, and many important photographers.

Cornell Capa, Robert Capa's brother, founded the Bischof-Capa-Seymour Photographic Memorial Fund in New York in 1966 in memory of the three Magnum photographers who had been killed in the course of their work. Burri-Bischof was appointed by Capa to the fund's board of trustees. In 1968, the fund, now renamed the International Fund for Concerned Photography, held a first exhibition in New York.

Burri-Bischof was invited by Capa to bring the entire display to Zurich. There it was shown at the Heidi Weber Museum–Centre Le Corbusier in the lakefront neighbourhood of Seefeld, in 1970. The exhibition was a great success. Many well-known photographers and prominent figures from Paris and New York attended the opening event.

Originally envisaged as a Swiss offshoot of Cornell Capa's New York-based foundation, the Swiss Foundation for Photography was officially created on May 4, 1971 as an autonomous institution under Swiss law.

According to its own figures, the Fotostiftung Schweiz (the Swiss Foundation for Photography) holds a collection of more than 50 estates and some 50,000 original prints. Together with the Photo Elysée museum in Lausanne, it is a major institution dedicated to Swiss photography.

Burri-Bischof was one of eight co-founders of the institution. The first president, Manuel Gasser, was very well connected, both on the Zurich cultural scene and with big names in industry and business. Together, Gasser and Burri-Bischof skillfully negotiated hospitality rights for the new foundation at the Kunsthaus Zürich art museum.

The path was now open for a photography department like the one at New York's MoMA. A first exhibition, Photography in Switzerland - 1840 to the Present, was held in the museum's Bührle room in autumn 1974. It was a resounding success. A first stock-staking of photographic creation in Switzerland, it went on tour for several years.

The journalist and photo historian Charles-Henri Favrod was among those who contributed to the book publication of the same name. This led to closer exchange with the French-speaking part of Switzerland, in particular the Lausanne photography museum, the Musée de l'Élysée, which Favrod had founded in the 1980s.

Burri-Bischof played a key role in the decision-making process within the Swiss Foundation for Photography; her warm-hearted nature and ability to build and cultivate friendships were also reflected in her professional work.

Over the years, Burri-Bischof was able to organise six to seven exhibitions a year at the Kunsthaus Photo Gallery – not just on Swiss photography, but also international greats and old masters. The first solo exhibition was devoted to Robert Frank in 1976. Gasser had already dedicated an entire issue of Du to the prominent Zurich native and adoptive New Yorker in 1962. By the tenth anniversary of the Foundation for Photography in 1981, Burri-Bischof had a total of 36 exhibitions to her name.

At the Kunsthaus Zürich, Burri-Bischof was a pioneer in bringing photography as an art to the public at large. This also benefitted the Stockeregg Photo Gallery, founded in 1979, for the exhibitions at the Kunsthaus had awakened an appetite for photography among well-heeled collectors.

Burri-Bischof, woman of the world and promoter of photography in Switzerland, died in 1986. She did not live to see the retrospective of Werner Bischof's photographs at the Kunsthaus Zürich, which she had worked on for two years. Without her, photography in Switzerland would not have had the same status or achieved the same recognition that it does today.

Edited by David Eugster. Translated from German by Julia Bassam.

Articles in this story

• Rosellina Burri-Bischof – a life in pictures

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