Paul Senn (1901-1953) Swiss photojournalist Exhibition at the Couvent des Minimes Free admission from Tuesday to Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5.30 p.m.

But who is Paul Senn? A Swiss photographer, a witness of his time, a sharp eye which testifies in two decades, from 1930 to 1950, of a tragic time or will be set up with fascism and Nazism, the matrix of the catastrophe to come. Humanist photographer, he will then become a war reporter and witness of a post-war period from which he will draw glimmers of hope with marvelous color photographs. In the 1930s, against a backdrop of economic crisis, social clashes and political violence, Swiss photographers, in the forefront of whom Paul Senn, reported on the news, Leica and Rolleiflex in hand, in a very dynamic illustrated press . Paul Senn at the beginning photographs the workers in the fields or at the factory with empathy but also a workers' demonstration repressed with gunfire by the police in Geneva. His report in the homes of abandoned children who live in unworthy conditions caused a scandal. He already traveled through Europe with a predilection for Spain where he went several times before the outbreak of the civil war. He will return there under the bombs in 1937, a tireless witness of the war and the Spanish exile alongside his friends from Ayuda Suiza. He will also witness the exodus of the French army to Switzerland in June 1940 and the internment camps under the Vichy regime, in particular in Rivesaltes. He will track the joy of Liberation and reconstruction throughout the world, in France, Italy and many in the Americas, which he will travel at length from Canada to Mexico, lingering in the United States, whose dynamism and colors fascinates him. In one hundred photos and fifteen reports, this exhibition shows the diversity of the journalistic work of a Swiss reporter witness of his time, a lesson which shows that photography is never neutral. The Paul Senn archives, hundreds of thousands of negatives, are housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Bern. Markus Schürpf, who administers this fund, has organized several exhibitions on this photographer and manages a gigantic database on Swiss photographers.