Photo Mosaic Switzerland: The Archive of the Image Agency Comet Photo AG

Comet Photo AG was founded in Zurich 1952 to supply images to local and national media. The agency quickly built a reputation for both the documentary and aesthetic quality of its photographers’ work, with the 1950s and 1960s arguably marking the culmination their achievements. Commercially, Comet Photo’s heyday were the 1960s and 1970s, followed by a slow decline eventually leading to its closing-down in 1999. Comet Photo’s legacy of around 1m images is now kept at ETH Zurich’s Image Archive. Photo Mosaic Switzerland features some 150 images from the Comet Photo collection, documenting the rapid changes Switzerland underwent during the 20th century’s later decades. They are arranged by topic, such as change and modernisation, industry, agriculture, the vanishing and vanished, the traditional and timeless, celebrities and glamour, or major events. An introductory essay tells the story of Comet Photo AG and its work and legacy, placing it among its competitors national and international, and looks also at Switzerland’s social and cultural history from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century. Text in English and German.
Also available in the Pictorial Worlds series: Science in Sight ISBN 9783858813954 Swissair Souvenirs ISBN 9783858813596 The World in Pocket-size Format ISBN 9783858813398. AUTHOR: Georg Kreis has been a professor of modern and Swiss history at University of Basel 1986 to 2008. Michael Gasser is head of the archives at ETH-Bibliothek, ETH Zurich’s main library. Nicole Graf is head of the Image Archive, ETH-Bibliothek in Zurich.
130 colour, 20 b/w illustrations