Werner Bischof (26 April 1916 – 16 May 1954) was a Swiss photographer and photojournalist. He became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1949, the first new photographer to join its original founders.[1] Bischof's book Japan (1954) was awarded the Prix Nadar in 1955.[2]
Bischof was born in Zürich, Switzerland. When he was six years old, the family moved to Waldshut, Germany, where he subsequently went to school. In 1932, having abandoned studies to become a teacher, he enrolled at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich. While there he studied alongside .[3] He graduated cum laude in 1936.
From 1939 on, he worked as an independent photographer for various magazines, in particular, du, based in Zürich. He travelled extensively from 1945 to 1949 through nearly all European countries from France to Romania and from Norway to Greece. His works on the devastation in post-war Europe established him as one of the foremost photojournalists of his time. He was pionieer of color photography since 1939 in some rare technology and used it to document in a large number of color photographies the appaling ruins of former so called executioner and victim countries, Germany and Poland (1946-1948) because their border it was the place where the last war broke out, in pionieering and rare technology of color photography described by photographers as the same process as Technicolor but in photography, not in cinematography using his American Devin Tricolor (1934) camera with tripod. Most of the color photographies from Germany and Poland have not yet been published, but have been preserved in the archive in Zürich. Technology used by him was far better and accurate than Agfacolor used during the war in Europe.[4]
He was associated into Magnum Photos in 1948 and became a full member in 1949. At that time Magnum was composed of just five other photographers, its founders Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, David Seymour, and Ernst Haas.
The focus of much of Bischof's post-war humanist photography was showing the poverty and despair around him in Europe, tempered with his desire to travel the world, conveying the beauty of nature and humanity.
Of photography, Bischof said -
In 1951, he went to India, freelancing for Life,[5] and then to Japan and Korea. For Paris Match he worked as a war reporter in Vietnam. In 1954, he travelled through Mexico and Panama, before flying to Peru, where he embarked on a trip through the Andes to the Amazonas on 14 May. On 16 May 1954 his car fell off a cliff on a mountain road in the Andes, and all three passengers were killed.