Andri Pol

A major retrospective of Andri Pol’s work, titled Poliversum, is currently on view at Fotostiftung Schweiz, an outstanding photography museum in Winterthur, Switzerland. It’s the culmination of a four-decade career and a long list of books — from Grüezi to Where is Japan.

Pol’s reportages, portraits and observations of everyday life in Switzerland (as well as Japan and China), often reveal a sly sense of humor. As a Swiss person, I appreciate the way he sees the country: not romantic — instead, quirky and peculiar.

In 2014, Pol came out with the book Inside CERN. Like Taryn Simon, Pol was granted rare institutional access to the world’s largest particle physics organization, but the method and results diverge. Whereas Simon works from archives — reconstructing history through research and a semiotics-trained eye for systems — Pol embedded himself, in real time, and spent an extended period observing informal, banal and messy moments. Not unlike Lars Tunbjörk’s oeuvre, one can trace this deadpan style in plenty of current commercial photography — though few pull off the ethnography as convincingly.