Menschen Tiere Abenteuer

The camera was Andreas Züst's constant companion. On walks through the countryside by day or throughthe city by night, he kept a photographic diaryon black-and-white film with his trusty Pentax, makingnotes about each of the subjects and events in hisalmanacs. The first almanac, covering the years1978 - 1983, is the basis of his latest book Menschen Tiere Abenteuer ("People Animals Andventures"). His observations of visual phenomena, social tiesand contemporary events, presented in chronologicalorder, range widely from Zürich's Bahnhofstrasse andnocturnal street scenes to patterns in ice and portraitsof the artist Anton Bruhin and Züst's own family. This chronological perspective may well be the mostrevealing approach to the artist and his rather melancholywork. And yet he clearly takes an interest in the mediumitself - in his attempts to capture on film the very actof taking pictures, in his double exposures and in hiseye for the photography of everyday life. To capture allof this, Züst sometimes used Agfa Ortho 25, a black-and-white film with an aesthetic all its own. This painstakingly researched publication alsogives a compact sense of Züst's overall work in that allthe motifs from his color series are represented closelytogether in the black-and-whites here (some of thoseseries have already been worked up in his booksBekannte Bekannte 1 and 2, Roundabouts, Himmel). SoMenschen Tiere Abenteuer is Züst's most personalbook and the most revealing of his artistic ?uvre as awhole.