Fred Waldvogel: Pilz I Fotografie

Mushrooms of all kinds sprout from the walls on the second floor of Museum im Bellpark. There are highlights to discover from the remarkable archive of the Swiss mushroom photographer Fred Waldvogel (1922-1997), who left behind a collection of over a thousand large slides of a quality that is unique in the world.
Waldvogel achieved something that previously only technical-scientific drawings were thought capable of: capturing the specific characteristics of a mushroom in just one photographic image. His pictures were therefore printed in the mushroom identification books published by Silva and thus popularized in the 1970s, but his name remained largely unknown. Yet despite their objectivity, there is something astonishing about his pictures: His “mushroom tableaux”, which he carefully and artfully arranged on his repro table in the studio, open up the universe of mushrooms to us as an almost infinitely diverse realm. Waldvogel’s mushrooms confront us in “individual and group portraits” as “creatures”, sometimes flat like design objects, sometimes reminiscent of mythical creatures. Our gaze is unsettled: Is what we see nature – or interpretation?