René Groebli

René Groebli, sometimes spelt Gröbli, (born 9 October 1927 in Zurich) is an exhibiting and published Swiss industrial and advertising photographer, expert in dye transfer and colour lithography.

Technically it is a portfolio rather than a book, with pages unbound and laid in loose, inspired by the Man Ray and Paul Éluard publication FACILE (1935) which he purchased on his first trip to Paris in 1948.

The small book, Das Auge der Liebe ('The Eye of Love'), though respected for its design and photography, caused some controversy, but also brought Groebli attention.

Camera Annual review of the work in 1955 pronounced it "a tender photo-essay on a photographer’s love for a woman.” After the death of photojournalist Paul Senn in 1953 and the killing of Werner Bischof in Peru in 1954, Kurt Blum, Robert Frank and René Groebli were newly admitted to the Kollegium Schweizerischer Photographen.

In the same year, and with four other Swiss photographers, Werner Bischof, Robert Frank, Gotthard Schuh and Sabine Weiss, René Groebli was represented with a picture in the exhibition The Family of Man curated by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Many well-known graphic artists such as Werner Zryd, Victor N. Cohen, Karl Gerstner and Manfred Tulke commissioned the studio for lucrative photo assignments.

In 1957, the American photographic journal Popular Photography published in its 'Color Annual' a twelve-page image series hyperbolically entitled 'René Groebli - Master of Color'.

The workplace in Zurich-Wollishofen was equipped with the latest and best technical facilities and through the 1960s and early 1970s the business employed a staff of up to twelve, with good profits made from servicing the advertising photography industry.

Important employees who worked at Groebli from the 1960s to the late 1970s, were, among others, photographers Felix Eidenbenz, Lotti Fetzer, Tom Hebting, Matthias Hofstetter, Peter Oberle, Anna Halm Schudel and Peter Schudel, Liselotte Straub, Katharina Vonow, and Heinz Walti, the volunteer Dona de Carli, re-photographer Jean-Pierre Trümpler, laboratory technician Sylvette Françoise Trümpler-Hofmann and Uschi Schliep, apprentice.

[21] In the 1970s, talented young photographers, including former Groebli co-workers and employees, opened their own photo studios and strove to answer the ever higher demands of advertising agencies and the increased pressure of competition.

[22] Groebli returned to making personal photographic essays in colour and in black and white, in series titled Fantasies, Ireland, The Shell, Burned Trees, N. Y.