This picture of young dancers was taken in the mid-1950s by the Swiss photographer Ernst Scheidegger at the Parisian ballet school established by Madame Rousanne Sarkissian. At the time, Scheidegger was an associate of the Magnum agency, working as a photojournalist in France and beyond. Scheidegger had been introduced to the agency by his mentor and fellow countryman Werner Bischof three years earlier. At around the time this picture was made, however, double tragedy ended this part of Scheidegger’s career. In May 1954, Bischof died in a car crash while on assignment in the Peruvian Andes; nine days later, Magnum founder Robert Capa was also killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam. Capa had taken the place of Scheidegger in Vietnam, on commission for Life magazine, after Scheidegger’s visa application had not come through.
The double shock of those events prompted Scheidegger to abruptly leave Paris and photojournalism to take up a position as a lecturer at a visual design school in Ulm in southern Germany. Though he returned to photography throughout his life – including his long series of portraits of his close friend artist Alberto Giacometti – Scheidegger thereafter, until his death in 2016, also worked as a film-maker and an editor, publisher and painter.
He rarely spoke about the deaths of Bischof and Capa, and he archived the pictures he had taken in the early 50s, alongside an unopened box of prints containing work gifted by his former Magnum friends and colleagues. As part of the celebrations in Switzerland to mark the centenary of Scheidegger’s birth, an exhibition – Eye to Eye – presents some of this archived work from the 1950s beside the celebrated later portraits of artists. Some of the eyes in the prints from those early years are looking out at the viewer for the first time.
• Eye to Eye is at MASI, Lugano, Switzerland, 18 February-21 July
