Images Vevey blossoming in Japan!

Spring in Kyoto is particularly renowned for its cherry blossom. This year, from 15 April to 14 May, Kyoto is also highlighting the florescence of the distinctly Swiss tradition of peel-off coffee creamer lids. The 2023 Kyotographie international photography festival, entitled Border, invited Images Vevey to present a new version of the Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard’s ESCAPISM series in a truly exceptional setting.

Images Vevey and Kyotographie liaised to entirely redesign the scenography of this exhibition to adapt it to the Shimadai Gallery in a former sake and silk shop in downtown Kyoto.

Escapism is defined as a sort of imaginary journey, a form of evading reality, an “attitude that entails withdrawing from the world and from public life through flight or disillusionment.”

Since the 1960s, Switzerland has printed millions of pictures on thin peel-off foil lids. For decades, collecting them became something of a Swiss obsession, as they were swapped between collectors to complete a series on a particular topic. Their widespread popularity embedded them in the Swiss collective imagination. The various series represent all genres of photography, from fashion to documentary, portrait, architecture, landscape, etc.

For his ESCAPISM project, Roger Eberhard concentrated on exotic scenery, using a high-resolution camera to crop the shots to reclaim extremely close-up images. The artist thus plunges into a very Swiss form of fleeing from everyday life through imagination, for the duration of a coffee break. Only the grid of the drastically enlarged screen prints on display indicates the industrial nature of images and inevitably brings spectators back from their moment of escapism to the reality of the present moment.

The Swiss photographer Roger Eberhard (1984) resides in Zurich and Berlin. He focuses on contemporary issues such as territory, borders, and globalisation. In 2011, he founded b.frank books in Zurich to publish artists’ projects. His Human Territoriality series was nominated at the 2020 Swiss Design Awards and the selection of photographs published from this series was singled out as one of The Most Beautiful Swiss Books of the year 2020. Roger Eberhard’s work is exhibited in various establishments around the globe, such as the C/O Berlin and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. He began creating his ESCAPISM series when confined within the borders of his homeland during the coronavirus pandemic.