Ernst Brunner

• 100 Bilder von einem Kohlemeier im Entlebuch, Eigenverlag, Luzern 1940 • Brunner, E., & Vereinigung für Luzernische Bauernhausforschung. (1954). Programm für die Bestandesaufnahme von bäuerlichen Hausformen im Kanton Luzern gemäss [Para] 1 und 2b der Statuten der Vereinigung für Luzernische Bauernhausforschung. • Die Bauernhäuser im Kanton Luzern, Schweizerische Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, Basel 1977 • Peter Pfrunder, Ernst Brunner. Photographien 1937-1962 (Monograph), Offizin, Zürich 1995. • Emil Brunner, Bergkinder 1943-1944, Limmat Verlag Zürich 2004

In 1936 Brunner worked on an inventory of historical monuments in the context of a public employment program for the unemployed. He put to use his skills as a photographer which he had taught himself in the 1920s. By chance he showed his avocational photography to publisher 'Regina Verlag' in Zurich and was soon photographing for the influential national magazines Schweizer Heim and Schweizer Familie from 1936 until the 1950s. His main subject matter was everyday life in traditional rural Switzerland, focusing particularly on agriculture and craft. Brunner experienced a rapidly changing rural Swiss life and he wanted to preserve this world and the inherited knowledge of farmers who worked hard without mechanical help, with few resources and close to Nature in glorious alpine regions. Brunner was systematic as a photographer, using the camera to document his subjects objectively. He composed his photos with strong and simple forms, often shooting from above or below his subjects, seeking more effective descriptive visual information. He made photo sequences on the same subject, or to document a work or social process, as he wanted to capture the rural world accurately. Longer sequences of images document workflows and put great emphasis on the involvement of the historical, geographic and social environment, for example, when he photographed craftsmanship. Typically he made between ten and twenty photos, and sometimes as many as one hundred separate images, like frames of an ethnographic film (for example in his series on charcoal burning). These sequences show all the relevant details of a process, while the aesthetic impact of individual photos is of secondary importance. As an archivist, he kept a careful filing system in which his images were gathered under keywords such as 'work', 'architecture', or 'customs', and within each of these, the subjects were separated geographically. • Illustration — Ernst Brunner (1945-1946) Photograph of sign protesting the construction of an hydroelectric reservoir at Urseren. Leading up to and during WW2 Das Schweizer Heim used Brunner’s imagery to serve a conservative and nationalist agenda, removing them from the sequences and contexts of his anthropological studies, often by cropping the images, to isolate imagery of the heroic, traditional and quintessentially Swiss, alpine farm worker. Incidental to his imagery of traditional lifestyles, and as evidence of his own conservationist values, was his deliberate recording of the conflicting reactions to hydroelectric schemes in Switzerland which were to bring cheap electricity, but with the consequence of flooding of pastures and relocation of historic villages and their populations, as well as the industrialisation rural areas.