Ernst Brunner

In 1929 he left the carpentry trade and moved to Lucerne, where after having been influenced by the ideas of the Bauhaus, Brunner worked as an interior designer at Theiler + Helber.

Brunner experienced a rapidly changing rural Swiss life and he wanted to preserve this world and the inherited knowledge of farmers who worked hard without mechanical help, with few resources and close to Nature in glorious alpine regions.

Longer sequences of images document workflows and put great emphasis on the involvement of the historical, geographic and social environment, for example, when he photographed craftsmanship.

Typically he made between ten and twenty photos, and sometimes as many as one hundred separate images, like frames of an ethnographic film (for example in his series on charcoal burning).

[2] Incidental to his imagery of traditional lifestyles, and as evidence of his own conservationist values, was his deliberate recording of the conflicting reactions to hydroelectric schemes in Switzerland which were to bring cheap electricity, but with the consequence of flooding of pastures and relocation of historic villages and their populations, as well as the industrialisation rural areas.

[5] He selected a photograph by Brunner, probably shown to him by Swiss editor Arnold Kübler from Du magazine[6] in which it had been published in a 1950 issue devoted to dance.