Inside Switzerland’s prized press archive

Switzerland’s largest media company, Ringier, has donated its analogue photo library from the last century to the canton of Aargau. Photojournalist Siegfried Kuhn explains some of the most striking images he shot for the company.

In 1959, the Ringier publishing house bought the Arnold Theodor Pfister (ATP) photo agency and launched Switzerland’s first tabloid newspaper, Blick, which relied heavily on photo images.

With the ascent of digital imaging, Ringier in 2009 handed over its collection of analogue photography to the Aargau cantonal archives. Containing some seven million prints taken between the 1930s and the 1990s, it is the single most important press archive in the country.

According to the archives’ project leader, Nora Mathys, doing the inventory will take “generations”. The cantonal parliament recently allocated CHF 1.8 million over a three-year period to allow the archives to share the collection with the public and to seek financial investors.

swissinfo.ch visited the Ringier archive in Aargau and spent time with Kuhn, who started working as a photojournalist with the company’s photo agency in 1959. Kuhn reveals the stories behind four images he shot during a career at Ringier that lasted over 30 years.