Maurice Schobinger

Paris, 13 November 2015, 21:37. Maurice Schobinger was on the patio of La Belle Équipe in the 11^th arrondissement when the bar became one of the targets in a series of terrorist attacks. At the time of the attack, he instinctively sought shelter behind a tree on the edge of the pavement. This impulse saved his life. The layers of plant fibres were dense enough to prevent the bullets from reaching him. In light of this experience, and guided by his memories of those events in Paris, Maurice Schobinger feels drawn to photographing trees at night. FIN is his deliberation on fleeting moments in time that can change everything. His photographs are displayed on ten wooden monoliths in a lakeside green space that is home to century-old trees.

Over the course of his trips to Eastern Europe, Maurice Schobinger made the Passages series, focusing on bus and tram passengers. For Festival Images, the photographer transformed a bus operating on the Vevey-Montreux-Chillon-Villeneuve line into an itinerant exhibition of his photographs of travelers on the urban network of the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk. This mobile display functioned as a trompe l’oeil, inviting passengers to connect, for a brief moment, with the anonymous people who use public transport every day.

Between 2008 and 2010, Maurice Schobinger did several trips to the Russian city of Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad, largely destroyed by the bombings in 1942. There, he discovered the diary of Serafima Fedorovna Voronina, a schoolmistress who died under the bombs. Bringing together this victim’s writing and the photographic testimony of the Swiss artist, the Stalingrad Volgograd Mémoire exhibition was presented on an imposing rusty steel structure in the center of Vevey. This monumental installation evoked the massive “Red October” steel works that supplied equipment to the Soviet army during World War II.