Henry Leutwyler

Swiss photographer Henry Leutwyler built an international career and has been acclaimed for his portraits of stars on covers of globally renowned magazines. In 1979, when he was just 17 years old, he discovered the work of Philippe Halsman at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. This was just one month after the death of this icon of twentieth-century photography. Thirty-eight years on, Henry Leutwyler delved into Philippe Halsman’s archives and spent several months staging his many personal belongings to create a biography of the photographer with 101 LIFE magazine covers to his name. Henry Leutwyler’s project Philippe Halsman. A Photographer’s Life pays a unique tribute to the artists he so greatly admires, while also evoking the era of analogue photography in today’s digital age. Exhibited in the Swiss Camera Museum, his work echoes the collection of objects relating to the history of photography.

In February 2009, a few months before Michael Jackson’s death, when news of the auction of his belongings was made public, an American magazine sent Henry Leutwyler to California to immortalize the star’s mythical shiny white glove. Upon arrival, the Swiss photographer discovered a huge warehouse packed with piles of crates filled with the singer’s possessions. The Neverland Lost, A Portrait of Michael Jackson series acts almost as a premonition and a posthumous inventory, showing the portrait of a man torn between his flamboyant public persona and a troubled private life, a photographic tribute to the man who was “King of Pop”, but also king of extravagance.

Henry Leutwyler spent over ten years in his New York studio photographing hundreds of objects that once belonged to celebrities. In the process of this long survey, he came across Frank Sinatra’s address book from the 1970s. Page after page, it revealed the names and numbers of the crooner’s acquaintances and friends, including Hollywood stars, influential politicians and prominent executives. The Hi There series sketches out an intimate portrait of the singer, presented inside a disused telephone booth where viewers can be tempted to dial the number of former American politician Henry Kissinger, or dance a memorable My Way inside Switzerland’s smallest museum.