Jakob Tuggener

Jakob Tuggener (1904 – 1988) was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and began taking photographs in 1926. In 1934 he began a thirty-year project of photographing society and opera balls in Zurich, St. Moritz, and Vienna. Unlike other photographers who recorded the balls in a journalistic manner, Tuggener took very personal photographs that reflected his adoration of the elegant women and fascination for nocturnal society life. He wrote”…it was a fairy tale of feminine beauty and flowing silky radiance…” Tuggener insisted on a subjective, poetic approach, which he powerfully presented in book maquettes. Eight completed ball maquettes were found in his estate. Each had been assembled from many different ball nights and poetically arranged into a continuous picture-sequence without text, simulating a single evening at a ball.

Jakob Tuggener was an important early influence on his fellow countryman Robert Frank who responded to both his subjective point of view and his interest in sequencing. Frank introduced Tuggener to Edward Steichen, the Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Steichen included Tuggener in three survey shows at MoMA, most importantly his classic exhibition The Family of Man in 1955.