Karlheinz Weinberger

Swiss photographer and documentarian Karlheinz Weinberger produced visual records of the Zurich underground in the years following the Second World War. His earliest subjects included local counterculture youths, as well as participants in Zurich’s gay scene. Later on, during the 1960s, Weinberger photographed the emerging culture of rock and roll, capturing obsessed adolescents, American musicians, and rebel celebrities on film. His 1961 photo Zürich um 1961, for example, shows an immaculately coifed teenager sitting in a bare apartment, donning in an Elvis Presley medallion around his neck. Like many of Weinberger's subjects, the unnamed boy looks erotically defiant, and mean. 

Weinberger did not exhibit his photographs until the 1980s, before which time, he produced work under the anonymous and protective pseudonym, “Jim.” Since then, his work has been shown at the Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich, the Swiss Institute in New York, and the Swiss National Museum, among others institutions.