The Photographer Werner Stuhler
"My photographs are the result of long and intensive laboratory work. Through my manipulation, fields and meadows can become lines and structures, grasses can transform into fish or strange hieroglyphs, and the cut surfaces of wood can resemble flower shapes." (Werner Stuhler 2003)
Werner Stuhler's work is characterized above all by his intensive exchange with fellow photographers and other visual artists of the post-war avant-garde. Just one year after beginning his photography apprenticeship in Wangen in 1948, the "fotoform" group was founded in southern Germany. This group consisted of aspiring photographers who, shortly after the end of World War II, recognized subjectivity as an individual experience of the world and dedicated themselves to its revival in photographic design. The formal language of fotoform significantly influenced the young Stuhler, although he never officially joined the group or its successor movement, "Subjective Photography."
Under this influence, he increasingly developed his own photographic style, which soon attracted public attention and was recognized with awards. In 1952, he received the Gold Medal at the International Portrait Exhibition in Bologna for a portrait of a boy, and just two years later, the coveted Photokina plaque. At the end of the 1950s, he was honored as one of the best photographers of the year in the International Photography Yearbook in London.
These recognitions strengthened Werner Stuhler's resolve to establish his own business as a photographer. He settled in Hergensweiler near Lindau and gradually built a professional base with work for publishers and magazines. As part of his travel book commissions, he undertook numerous trips to Southern Europe until the 1990s, publishing diversely illustrated books about the region.
During this productive phase, Stuhler took the opportunity to further develop his own photo-experimental formal language. Under the encouragement of his friend Heinz Hajek-Halke, he expanded his darkroom into a professional laboratory, conducting experiments with multiple exposures, montages, solarization, tonal separation, masking, and negative printing. He remained connected to fotoform and kept in touch with individual members, including Toni Schneiders:
"We often met at Jay LeBrun's shop in Bodolz near Lindau. TThe shop belonged to LeBrun, an engineer who spent his free time trying to make a name for himself as an inventor of photographic equipment, a lender of books and photographic equipment, and an alchemist for photographic chemicals. It was also an inspiring place for the exchange of ideas about photographic innovations." (Werner Stuhler 2003)
In his photo-experimental attempts, which tended toward abstraction and pictorial alienation, Werner Stuhler also received support from his friend, the Bauhaus painter Georg Muche. In 1967, the two artists collaborated on a project that produced photographs of mummified owls, which were later reworked both photographically and in paintings and published under the title totentänze.
Werner Stuhler's oeuvre thus reveals two essential components of his photographic work: his free work, which expresses his creative will and his joy of experimentation, and his commissioned work, which emphasizes documentary observation. Both working methods interact directly and mutually reinforce each other's artistic expressiveness.
Werner Stuhler's archive, along with the photographic legacies of fotoform photographers Toni Schneiders and Peter Keetman, is a particularly suitable repository at the F.C. Gundlach Foundation. Research into this work reveals, on the one hand, a regional network around Lake Constance at the photographic level; and on the other hand, the mutual observation allows for a more precise specification of the efforts in the field of avant-garde photographic design in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s.
