Peter Knapp

The Works

Door of Sana’a
1987
220 x 132 cm
Cibachrom photo with manually scratched negative

In 1987, Peter Knapp traveled to the Republic of Yemen. While strolling through the old city of the country’s capital, Sana’a, he took three photographs of doors that he titled Sana’a Door, Sana’a Door II, and Sana’a Door III. Only the first two were later enlarged and exhibited in 1990 in a solo exhibition at the Paris Art Center, which was shown the following year in Palma de Mallorca.
The first of these was donated by the artist to the Stämpfli Foundation. The second shows a closed, old wooden door, which now belongs to a private collection. The photograph of the third door has never entered the art world and is in Peter Knapp’s archives.
During those years, in the late 1980s, the artist took a series of photographs of “found doors” during his travels. The blue-white lines that crisscross the image are the result of the artist manually scratching the negatives. Before printing and enlarging them, he manually scratched the negatives.
The image is a large vertical format, with a closed shot that makes any contextualization of time or space impossible. We know the location of the photograph only from the title, Sana’a Door. It shows us an empty, small space that we cannot define as a room, as it appears uncovered and open-air, in a state of abandonment and almost ruin. The opening, in fact, has no door and allows us a partial view of the interior. Horizontal wooden slats above and below mark the lintel; other vertical slats, separated from each other, allow us to glimpse the rightmost part of the so-called door. The dirt floor increases the feeling of precariousness and neglect, filled with small debris and dirt, with strings hanging haphazardly from the wood above and others, tied to both sides, seeming to block access to the interior in an undemanding and rather useless way.
The fine scratches that Knapp applied manually to the negative, seemingly whimsical, run through and complete the lines of the strings that hang and extend from one side of the open doorway to the other, harmonizing strangely with them and accentuating the sense of disorder of the empty space.

Pneus à Arles
(Tyres in Arles)
1991
50 x 40 cm
Single print

Pneus à Arles by Swiss photographer Peter Knapp is a found photograph, in this case a pile of old tyres awaiting recycling in Arles, which the artist stumbled upon by chance. As he says, photography is justified in the unrepeatable moment, turning something accidental that catches the passer-by’s eye or something ephemeral that immediately disappears into a monument.
Peter Knapp became famous as a fashion photographer, created his own style and was the photographic director of ELLE magazine for many years. He interrupted his career to become a conceptual and experimental artist, approaching social issues in a very personal way.
This image is just one more testimony to the generation of waste in industrial society and the search for aesthetic reflection.

The artist

(1931, Bäretswill, Zurich, Switzerland)

Peter Knapp took his first photographs in 1945. In 1947, he entered the Zurich School of Applied Arts, directed by Johannes Itten, a former Bauhaus professor, where he received a multidisciplinary artistic education. He began painting and in 1952 went to Paris to study at the School of Fine Arts.
He stood out for his skills as a designer and his love of typography. He joined the Galeries Lafayette in Paris, where he became an art and advertising director. His work caught the attention of Hélène Lazareff, editor of the fashion magazine ELLE. In 1959, he began an intense period of collaboration there as an art director and photographer until 1974, experimenting with all kinds of new techniques, such as working with images cut from 16mm film. This love of experimentation was further accentuated in his personal work.
In 1964, he stopped painting completely and focused on photography. He was one of the first artists to exhibit large-format color photographs, when most photographers were still producing black and white images in conventional formats.
Beginning in the 1970s, Peter Knapp increasingly focused his work on the fashion world, not only in ELLE but also in Stern, Vogue, and the Sunday Times Magazine, and dedicated himself almost exclusively to artistic creation using photography as a medium, free from the limitations inherent in commissioned work in fashion photography.
With his works of the sky and the sea, he approached an interesting reflection on emptiness as the starting point for all poetic creation. The presence and interaction of man and nature has been a constant throughout his work, which has increasingly moved closer to conceptual art. In the last decade, he has dedicated himself to works more closely related to the social issues of today’s world.