Peter Knapp - Mon temps

"What drives me: Translating ideas into images. I want to visualise my thoughts, express my fantasies and stories pictorially. Je ne prends pas de photos, je les fais."

With this attitude, Peter Knapp, born in 1931 in Bäretswil in the Zurich Oberland, became an influential figure in the international fashion world in the 1960s and 70s. After his training at the Zurich School of Applied Arts, he had great success, especially as art director of the Paris-based magazine Elle: in a time of social upheaval, which was reflected not least in fashion, he found the appropriate images for the liberation of the body and thoughts. Elle, under editor-in-chief Hélène Lazareff a leading medium of emancipation, contributed significantly to a fun-loving democratisation of female clothing: Prêt-à-porter instead of haute-couture, minijupe instead of corset, functionality instead of stiff elegance, self-confident women on the streets instead of mannequins in the studio. Both the layouts and the photographs by Peter Knapp conveyed this new attitude to the body and to life, in which many women of the 1960s recognised themselves.

The exhibition at the Fotostiftung Schweiz not only presents the work of the photographer and art director, but also brings to life the mood of an era and the changes in society at the time.