A village policeman documented the car madness of the 1960s

Arnold Odermatt was never a famous criminalist, he was just a simple village policeman in the Swiss canton of Nidwalden. But since the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, Odermatt has been the most important police photographer of his time. He did not photograph gangsters or drug narcos, instead he meticulously documented his police work in the 1960s.

Odermatt was a full-time canton police officer who took photographs – and was on call 24 hours a day. But he never took the camera out of his hand. With the same mixture of aesthetics and preservation of evidence with which he logs the accident sites, he also recorded his family, the club, and village life. A tireless and finicky reporter of the fortunes of Nidwalden.

In the 1990s, Urs Odermatt discovered his father’s work in forgotten archive boxes. In the picture book “Karambolage” only accident pictures are collected. Each photo tells the story of an accident and at the same time poses a riddle. The suddenness of the misfortune stands in an irritating contrast to the images in which time seems to stand still. The victims of the event, the automobiles lying deadly on their side, for them mobility and the acceleration of life have come to an abrupt end.

The everyday nature of the scenes is lifted to another level by Odermatt’s special photographic eye. The surroundings are rural and rural, but the pictures with their geometric structure and lines bring the coolness of the sixties to the sleepy Niederwald.

The calm in the destruction is dominated by an eerie omission: there are no people and no blood in these compositions. The dramatic moments of rescue or death that shortly before determined the location have left no traces whatsoever.

The homepage:

www.arnold-odermatt.ch

The book:
Arnold Odermatt: collision
Edited by Urs Odermatt.
German, French, English.
Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2003.

source site-6