Peter Werner Häberlin

Peter Werner Häberlin (25 May 1912 – 9 July 1953) was a Swiss photographer noted for his picture series made on treks across Saharan Africa between 1949 and 1952.

Biography

Peter Häberlin was born in 1912 in Kreuzlingen near Konstanz on Lake Constance (the Obersee Bodensee) and grew up in Singen, in Germany, just across the Swiss border. From 1928-1931 he took up an apprenticeship with a pastry chef in Berneck, Switzerland, at the eastern end of Lake Constance.

Travel At 21 years old Häberlin set out from his home in Canton Thurgau to walk to Africa and from 1932 to 1934 journeyed on foot from Switzerland to Italy stopping at Capri and Positano, before proceeding on to Palermo, where he embarked on a ship to Tunisia and Algeria where he saw the desert and stopped at the oasis of Biskra before heading farther south to the city of Touggourt. In Constantine, Algeria, Häberlin worked in the famous Pâtisserie Viennoise to restore his travel funds. He returned via Morocco and Gibraltar and subsequently made other trips in Europe during which, in 1935 in Stockholm, he attempted to meet the Swedish explorer Sven Hedin, who was known for his explorations of Asia, also in large desert areas, reported in his books published since the nineteenth century that were read avidly by Häberlin. was taken by Edward Weston, and is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). They are survived by a daughter and two grandsons. in locations including Colomb-Béchar (now Béchar), northern Algeria, in El Golea, central-northern Algeria, in a Tuareg camp near the Hoggar mountains, French Sudan (now Mali), Salah, central Algeria, northern Sahara, and Ghardaia cemetery, northern Algeria. and from the photographs themselves.

Recognition His frank, full-face photograph of a young woman with braided hair and decorative cicatrices on her cheeks and nose, taken in bright desert sunlight, is typical of his work in Northern Africa; made out of his curiosity about a timeless, unspoilt culture. It was selected by curator Edward Steichen for the world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition The Family of Man, seen by 9 million visitors and published in a catalogue which has sold 4 million copies and has never been out of print. An Associated Press report of the time suggests that the picture may have been amongst those torn down in Moscow by the Nigerian student Theophilus Neokonkwo while The Family of Man was being exhibited there at its last venue in 1959. His actions were in a protest at colonialist attitudes to black races.

Death and legacy

Shortly after returning from his last trip, Häberlin died in a tragic accident in Zürich in 1953, in the midst of his preparations for a new expedition to Mexico. His estate was bequeathed to the Fotostiftung Switzerland, Winterthur.

Some of his photographs were published posthumously in 1956 in the book Yallah, completed by Häberlin’s father with the help of the American author Paul Bowles and with a foreword by Bowles who in 1933 also trekked through the Algerian Sahara to Tunisia. The New Yorker in a 1957 review reported that it was the work “of one of the great photographers of our times, capable of showing, as only art can, what would otherwise have remained hidden”, and other reviewers discern a poetic dimension to pictures that in other contexts would be documentary. Without the book, Häberlin would likely have remained unknown.