In 1932 he established his own business and in 1934, he produced his first commissioned book, MFO, a portrait of the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon, and afterwards bought a Leica camera and photographed for the first time at the Grand Ball in Zurich.
After experiencing the glories of night-life at the then famous balls held by the Reimann School at which he trained in photography, these extravagant society events obsessed and enchanted Tuggener, with their “alabaster light” illuminating a “fairy tale of women and flowing silk” and they were a subject to which he returned to document for two decades; over the 30s to the 50s he photographed the soirées in hotels like the Palace in St. Moritz, the Baur au Lac and the Dolder Grand Hotel & Curhaus and the Vienna Opera Ball.
In 1943, Tuggener's book Fabrik: Ein Bildepos der Technik,[7] a photographic essay on the relationship between man and industry, though not a commercial success, represented, in its filmic sequencing and absence of text (like one of his own silent films), an avant-garde breakthrough in Swiss photography.
In 1949, the new editor of Camera magazine, Walter Laubli (1902–1991), published a substantial portfolio of Jakob Tuggener's pictures made at upper-class entertainments and in factories, a world familiar to him from his early apprenticeship as a technical draftsman in Zurich, as well as a series of stills from his silent films, with an introduction by Hans Kasser (1907–1978), himself a photographer and member of the Werkbund.
He died in 1988, aged 84 and leaving an immense catalogue of a life's work, much of which has yet to be shown: more than 60 book maquettes, thousands of photographs, drawings, watercolors, oil paintings and silent film.