A Photographic Odyssey. Fred Boissonnas and the Mediterranean

Exhibition curated by Estelle Sohier, Rath Museum, Geneva, 25 September 2020 — 31 January 2021

The exhibition is dedicated to the oeuvre of the most prolific member of the “Boissonnas dynasty”, Fred Boissonnas (1858-1946). It sheds light on a whole aspect of his career that is both underappreciated and crucial: his journeys on the Mediterranean Sea, which he spent the first three decades of the 20th century roaming in search of light, of the Great Greece and free Egypt, of Homeric settings and Biblical landscapes. Thanks to multiple collaborations, he has created a body of work that promote the subjectivity of the photographic process and the capacity of photography to reconcile the visible with the invisible, geographic features with poetry, a scientifi c process with imagination. Through his work, he proposed a new interpretation of landscapes and our world’s history. Most of his photographs, presented here for the first time, are part of bequeathed collections now owned by the City of Geneva. Both poetic and mesmerising, this exhibition also attempts to provide insight into the ambivalent and passionate relationship between Europe and the Mediterranean.