Born in 1929 in Basel, Switzerland. Died 2022 in Basel, Switzerland.
Roger Humbert is a Swiss pioneer of concrete photography, which has produced an extensive photographic oeuvre since the 1950s. Concrete photography strives to create a pure photograph that focuses only on itself and is detached from iconography and symbolism. Based on the theories of the English photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn around 1916, the mysterious quality of light is at the center of concrete photography. Further stations in the history of development are the well-known Schadographs by Christian Schad, the Rayographs by Man Ray, as well as the photograms, luminograms and photomontages by László Moholy-Nagy, which were created at the Bauhaus. In 1967, Bern’s Galerie aktuell presented the experimental photographic ‘graphs of the young Swiss avant-garde photographers Roger Humbert, René Mächler, Jean-Frédéric Schnyder and Rolf Schroeter to the public for the first time under the title konkrete fotografie. Together with his photographic contemporaries, Humbert was on a quest for a new modern, experimental visual language. In the darkroom, Humbert experimented with photography and, using stencils, grids and punch cards, tried to find out what it meant to capture light photographically.
Humbert’s works are represented in international collections such as Fotostiftung Switzerland; Collection Peter C. Ruppert, Würzburg, Germany; Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, Switzerland; Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Switzerland.
