Lytle Shaw

The
M o i r E f f e c t

BookHorse & Cabinet Books

Published by
Bookhorse & Cabinet Books
Bookhorse
Kochstrasse 1
8004 Zurich, Switzerland
Cabinet Books
181 Wyckoff Street
Brooklyn, NY 11217
First Edition
Copyright Lytle Shaw 2012
All rights reserved

Edited by
Lex Trb, Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi
Designed by Lex Trb
Distributed worldwide by D.A.P. / Distributed Art Publishers
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ISBN 978-3-9523391-3-8

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This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
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T h e M o i r E f f e c t

For John Shaw

scenario

1 A Mysterious Package 13
2 Plate One 17
3 Swiss Air 24
4 The Moir Archive 34
5 The Masters Voice 39
6 Weissfluhjoch 46
7 Awsmbildungs 49
8 Bowels of the Goetheanum 57
9 The Upper Engadin 64
10
The Palazzo Salis 70
11 An Apprenticeship in Climbing 82
12 Above the Mineshaft 87
13 Flight to Appenzell 90
14 Cat Burglar 96
15
The Eiger Nordwand 102
16
Plate Two 107
17
The Rebar Pattern 112
18 Swiss Panorama 116

T h e M o i r E f f e ct
What a magnificent picture does nature spread
before the eye, when the sun, gilding the tops
of the Alps, scatters the sea of vapors which
undulates below. Through the receding veil the
theater of a whole world rises into view. Rocks,
valleys, lakes, mountains and forests fill the
immeasurable space, and are lost in the wide
horizon.We take in at a single glance the
confines of diverse states, nations of various
characters, languages and manners till the eyes,
overcome by such extent of vision, drop their
weary lids, and we ask of the enchanted fancy
a continuance of the scene.

Albrecht von Haller, Die Alpen (1732)

11

A M yst e r i ou s Pac k ag e
1
In the spring of 2001, I was sent on assignment to Zurich
by Cabinet magazine to document the life of the Swiss
photographer Ernst Moir. Cabinet was planning an
issue on failure and the case of Moir seemed especially apt, since he had narrowly missed making several
significant technological contributions to the history of
photography (his lifelong goal) and was remembered
only for the blurry moird photographs his partner,
Willi Ostler, misprinted and blamed, famously, on him.
This was what prompted the almost total withdrawal
from society that characterized Moirs later life; it is
also what makes documenting the photographer so
difficult, since both he and the Swiss government contrived to doctor, remove, or generally disrupt the paper
trail that would bring Moirs life into sharp focus.
Doing the best with what was available, I published an
article in 2002 (reproduced as chapter 2), which ended
with the central, and what seemed to me then irresolvable, mysteries of Moirs life.

More than most of my scholarly articles, Moirs
story seems to have struck a chord with readers, especially Europeans: a German historian of photography
wondered why Moir had been left out of prominent
histories of the medium; a Swiss graphic designer
invited to help me inquire further about his forgotten
countryman; finally a Dutch conceptual artist even
proposed doing a documentary film on Moir. But I

13

the moir effect

a mysterious package

demurred for want of evidence: The more I push, the

further he recedes, I warned. For the evidentiary
ground on which such a film would be built was slippery at best, and hemmed by bottomless voids. And
so I didnt relish the thought of forcing others, strangers, to retrace my precarious steps. Nevertheless, I
remained fascinated by Moir because my brief article
had forced me to simplify and condense his story.
In April of 2010, however, a mysterious package,
lacking return address, arrived at the door of a cabin I
had recently completed in a remote portion of New
Hampshire. Mysterious in part because only three or
four of my closest friends had the addressand I was
only staying at the cabin for a week. But more mysterious in its contents: a series of halftone page mockups
that immediately sent a shiver up my spine. For they
included photographs that appeared to be Moirs. I
had known about them from other materials in the
archive, but had assumed these photos lost. The pages
were arranged in Moirs characteristic grid, like specimen typologies, and focused particularly on Swiss farmhouses built of masonry corners, vertical timber infills,
and slate tile roofs. In between and around the margins were brief commentaries in a sans serif font. The
typologies also included bridges, electricity towers,
and mountain drainage devices. Such images, in themselves, might not have been enough to convince me
that the work was Moirs, but the pages also contained fair copy corrections in what I recognized as
Moirs hand: a condensation of native Alpine materials, sorted to maximum strength, he had added next
to one farmhouse. On another he wrote, enigmatically,
When gravity wins, no one hears. What was this?

What would it mean for gravity to win? Had Moir

spent too long in the Alpine sun on his fieldtrips? In
any case, nothing prepared me for the final three
images: the same farmhouses, but now moird.
It is true that I had run across a couple of such
images in 2001 when I was working in the Zurich
archive. But these, it seemed, were but bitter monuments the photographer had made, late in life, to his
legacyreprinting a series of his famous effects as if
to underline, now in his period of verbal silence, his
special contribution to the history of photography.
Knowing what I did about Moirs tireless pursuit of
technological innovations, and his career of narrow
misses, these images had pained me when I first saw
them. They crystallized his bitter though accurate
understanding of his contribution to history. Not fitting into my brief magazine article, though, I left
them out. But there was something much stranger
about these new images: that they were dated 1895
that is, before Ostlers failed commission. Why, then,
would Moir print several of these page layouts if,
after all, they represented simple mistakesmistakes
for which he was not yet infamous? Were they but
identical mistakes? In any case, why had he retained
them? What, more generally, was the purpose of this
book, and why had it never been published?

Perhaps his remarks on gravity could help me.
But lacking any contextthe location and terms of
his commission, his client, the exhibition or publication for which the photographs were destinedthe
statements were of little use. Maybe the photos themselves could aid me; they might, on closer inspection,
at least reveal location clues? I scoured for evidence,

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15

the moir effect

but Moirs was a proto-modernist practice of iconic
frontalitycontingent information simply did not
enter into his frame. The Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc
Godard once said that when you set out to make a
fiction, you also make a little bit of a documentary,
and vice versa. This seemed not to apply to Moir. I
had spent several hours with a loop, thinking how
archaic this method of searching was, when suddenly I
spotted letters on what I had previously seen as a tree
branch, but was actually a sign: S T A M P
A.
I scrolled Google Maps across the Atlantic, up
through the Mediterranean and onto Switzerland,
where I then zoomed in and typed the word. There
were actually several towns in Switzerland named
Stampa. Great, Id stumbled on a Swiss Springfield
right when I needed the most proper of proper names!
But going back through my Moir dossier I was gradually able to rule out towns one by one until a single
Stampa remained, in the far southern corner of Grau
bndenin the Val Bregaglia, just below the Engadin
valley. The classic work on this region was Christoph
Simonetts 1965 Die Bauernhuser des Kantons Grau
bnden. Simonett mentions a Canton Regional Building Archive in Chur. Perhaps they could help me trace
the photographs; failing that, I could also head directly
to the Val Bregaglia. While I had at first refused the
offer of help from the Swiss graphic designera man
named Lex Trbthese photographs had changed
my mind. I thus contracted Trb, made arrangements,
and booked my flight immediately. On the plane, I
reviewed my article of 2002.

16

P l ate O n e
2

Ernst Moir among his siblings.

Mystery has always surrounded the life of the Swiss

photographer Ernst Moir (18571929). Not least because, though frequently photographed throughout
his life, it is almost impossible to see him. Indeed, the
blurry photographs of Moir possibly point to the
origin of (and certainly exemplify) the technological
problem of two dot matrixes misaligning during printing and resulting in a flawed reproduction, now commonly know as the moir effect. Or, perhaps, these
photographs do not index the first human to produce
the moir effect at all, since we cannot be sure who they
depict. What we do know, first, is the Swiss governments account: that a photographer named Moir was
regarded, in the Switzerland of the 1920s, as impervious

17

the moir effect

plate one

to photography; second, that this bizarre disappearance became a source of nationalist pride (Moir was
applauded for his technological Ludditism by antimodernist elements within Swiss folk culture, just as
his supposed visual neutrality was seen, more generally, as socially exemplary); and third, that a collection
of photographsostensibly of Moir, and always with
one illegible figureis housed in Zurichs municipal
archives. Opposing this position stands counter-testimony from Moirs relatives (embarrassed, perhaps,
to have their name still associated with this famous
technological failure), which may implicate the Swiss
government itself in Moirs photographic illegibility.
It was to investigate this case of meta-failure that the
editors at Cabinet sent me to Zurich. There I would
document a documentary abyss.

Living inside the Zurich archive for two months,
I gradually pieced together the following biographical
outline. An Ernst Moir was indeed born, in 1857,
in the capital of the Swiss Confederations smallest
canton, Zug, within view of the Bernese Oberland.
Moirs primarily French ancestors made their way
from Geneva to Lucerne, where we find his father,
Pierre Wolfli Moir (a postal clerk and scientific tinkerer) playing a small role in the attacks on Jesuit
priests that precipitated Switzerlands democratic revolutions of 18471848. The subsequent inquiry into
these attacks, however, was hampered by the lack of
postmarks on the conspirators letters, for which Pierre
was held accountable. Exiled to Zug, Pierre seemed to
drop from sight: records of his later activities are scanty,
possibly because he instructed Ernst to vaporize his
correspondence.

Aside from carefully recorded chemical experiments

in his fathers improvised lab, the main records of
Moirs early education are decayed prints from his
Alpine photographic expeditions to the Jungfrau with
his Uncle Rudolf, on which the two would document
both geological and architectural curiosities, accompanied (we learn from verses inscribed onto the prints
themselves) by readings of Albrecht von Hallers classic
of Swiss proto-nationalism, Die Alpen. Moir seems
to have excelled at Zurichs Technical Institute, winning both the Uli Fleiss Laboratory Award, and the
Gottfried Taur Field Photographic Awardswhile,
however, being chastised for his habitual bureaucratic
errors, especially his failure to sign test and registration forms, a problem that would plague Moir throughout his career. Strangely, nothing in Moirs childhood
or college records suggests his imperviousness to photography. But Moirs complex relation to authorship
and representation does begin to emerge at this time,
especially in his copy of the influential color theories
of the poet Charles Cros, each of whose 272 pages bears
no fewer than seven of Moirs own signatures, in
widely varying styles. This pattern would continue in
his highly secretive post-university experiments in Zug.
Considered in the history of photography, Moirs
string of near patent misses is stunning: in March of
1879, he invented a photogravure process parallel in all
essentials to Klcs (published that year), but failed to
address his patent form. More tragically, Moirs pioneering use, in outdoor photography, of gelatin-silver
bromide instead of wet collodion (a process he had
discovered as a fourteen-year-old, on a trip with Uncle
Rudolf) did not become known until after Charles

18

19

the moir effect

plate one

Bennett had popularized the process in 1879. The most

crushing patent failure, however, was autochrome,
whose development Moir had followed closely since
his reading of Cros. From the beginning, the three color
filters used in the process had relied on fine grains of
potato starch, dyed orange, green, and mauve. The
dying process, especially the use of zinc phosphate to
produce the yellows, was both toxic and slow. Moirs
introduction of mature sweet potatoes was as elegant
as it was simple. Though Moir was in fact able to patent the sweet potato process, the untreated status of
the potato itself rendered the process, under Zug Canton law, a craft and not a science, thereby allowing the
Frenchman Louis Ducos du Hauron, and after him
the Lumire Brothers, to popularize their own threecolor systems in photographic technical journals.

Moir was crushed. Worse, after this protracted
string of failures, he found himself in desperate financial straits. Which accounts for his new partnership
with his college friend Willi Ostler in a more conventional photographic studio. Because Ostlers uncle,
Jrg, was the Canton Commissioner of Architecture,
they landed a long-term, lucrative project documenting Alpine architecture. Still, Moir seems not to have
been able to give up his hopes of discovering a new
photographic process. As early as 1882, Moir had
experimented with high-amperage flash bulbs in night
photography. By 1896, the craze for portraiture had
reached such a peak that Moir believed, were he able
to invent an outside flash mechanism that could merge
figures with the romantic night-time mountainscapes
most admired in portrait painting, that he could make
a definitive entrance into the technological history of

photography, and a mountain of Swiss francs. But on

3 August 1896, tragedy struck. Moir writes to his
father: Lili [Moirs bride] and I had left Zurich for a
weekend in Zermatt, where the Matterhorn backdrop
would insure the dramatic night portraits I wished to
produce. After two unsuccessful low-level flashes, I
increased the amperage. Lacking my spectacles, I misread 100 for 10. The effect was instantaneous and devastating. Lili grasped for her eyes and spun arcs on her
back on the chalets terrace while I, after smashing the
offending bulbs into innumerable shards, helplessly
pawed the tiles around her blind twirls. After two
months in Zermatt monitoring Lilis condition, Moir
was infinitely relieved to see signs of progress (though
Lili would always wear thick bifocals after the event,
and could never drive a car).

20

21

Low-level test flash of Lili.

the moir effect

plate one

Meanwhile, in Zurich, Willi was forced to move forward with the book documenting the government
architecture project without Moirs invaluable technical assistance. A novice at printing, Willi misaligned
the plates and produced a sequence of blurry images,
which were immediately rejected by the stern client. In
a moment of panic, Willi suggested to the government
agent who had descended on his shop that the business
was dually owned (a fact he was successful in proving
by Ernsts faulty records), and that the responsibility
for the quality of the prints was in Moirs hands. By
the time Ernst returned to Zurich two months later,
the moir effect was all over the papers.
After 1896, Moir rarely appeared in public. In
fact, it was not until 1927 (two years before his death)
that Moir became known as a recalcitrant photographic object. This because of a handful of halftone prints
(ostensibly) of the photographer included in an exhibition at the Alpine Museum in Bern called Mind
over Matterhorn, which documented para-scientific
phenomena among the Mountaineering Swiss. Here,
Moirs whole biography gets told through a consistent
photographic absence. We see Pierre, Uncle Rudolf,
Willi, Jrg, Lili, and many other of Moirs friends and
family, flanked by an eerie near-absencea figure almost
legible, but subject to a kind of technical poltergeist. Interpreting this absence as willed, the exhibition linked
Moir to Emma Kunz and the late Rudolf Steiner, who
embodied strains of holistic and anti-scientific sentiment
within Swiss popular medicine.

Because he refused to write (and even sign his
name) after 1896, Moirs own response to the exhibition is not known. Nor did Lili comment on her hus-

bands infamy until 1941, two years before her own

death, when she wrote an open letter to the new Swiss
Commissioner of Architecture. Inexplicably unpublished, this letter emerged only in 1998, accompanied
by documents that justified the suppression as a measure to insure faith in the Swiss central government
during the surrounding war, when both French and
German elements of the population suspected the
government of aiding the opposing side.

Lili describes an afternoon in November of 1896,
three months after the explosion of the moir effect
in the Zurich newspapers: Ernst had taken the train
to Zug to gain distance from the maelstrom that had
hold of his name. I remained in Zurich to oversee our
household. Returning from the Limmat vegetable quay,
I noticed two men emerging from our attic dormers
with stacks of framed photographs. Till then, rude
government officials had visited only our studio, not
our flat on Mnstergasse. I cursed the intruders from
two blocks away. Whether my suddenly frigid neighborseyeing the spectacle from their windowswere
in support of the theft, or had merely chosen to ignore
me, I do not know. Their daily glares told me only
that they, too, felt cheated, as Swiss, by the failure of
Herr Ostlers government-subsidized project, now
attributed to my dear Ernst, of whom every photograph was gone when I arrived. Now the scoundrels
have shown why. How Lili, with her weakened eyesight, was able to notice two small figures sixty yards
away adds one final mystery.

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23

Published in Cabinet Magazine, Summer 2002.

swiss air

The houses were nestled cozily along a hillside, each

with a broad roof and a light green lawn, the whole
patterned but not regularly gridded. To the north a few
larger industrial buildings flanked the residential zone,
each discretely integrated into its siteno sprawling
parking lots, no drive-through restaurants, no chainlink car purgatory, no box-store banlieue. The whole
built landscape actually approached Donald Judds
fantasy that industry and business are the making and
distribution of goods andshould be just that and no
more. In the US, one is inclined to poke fun at such
thinking. But like Strether in his increasingly slippery
attempt to rescue Chadwick from the clutches of
Europe, the view from the plane had gone right to
work erasing some of my hard drive, and I was beginning to feel like a nave American open to a surprising
turnaround in the old world. We hadnt even landed.

Tuning into the arrangement of these Swiss towns, I

allowed myself now to marvel at the kitchen gardens,
down along the river. These added a third, more minute
scale (and a range of new colors) to the immediately
legible organization of the town. Just that and no
more. What struck me was how close this reality was
to a diagram, to an exemplary model. Of course I
knew such tools as fictions: I had grown up with architectural models and come to be something of a connoisseur of their seemingly necessary departures from
lived experience and built formof how their promises undid themselves, that is, in actual space, in the
real-sized world. But apparently one had to go in search
of such awkward moments in Switzerland, for they
were visible neither from the plane, nor from the car
on my way into town.
One might think, then, that a culture that could
produce such diagrammatic reality wouldnt need to
play with toy trains, wouldnt need the compensation
of a minute, masterable world when the actual world
bent itself so seamlessly to its will. Perhaps model
trains were obligatory instructional devices: not merely
practical lessons in technics, but also spiritual clarification chambers. The equivalent of a guru nook in a
1970s American household. In any case, the taste for
model trains seemed to be dying out. Lex told me that
it was a hobby cultivated primarily by men over sixty.
Those, I began to speculate, that had caught the very
tail end of Swiss modernizationwith its last dramas
of a heroic daily life, a life that required particular
kinds of images to keep up its momentum.

Lex had been waiting for me at the Zurich airportcar parked directly in front of the terminal, as if

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25

Swiss Air
3
When anything new struck him as coming up,
or anything already noted as reappearing,
he always immediately wrote, as if for fear that
if he didnt he would miss something; and also
that he might be able to say to himself from time
to time,She knows it now, even while I worry.

Strether in Henry Jamess
The Ambassadors

the moir effect

swiss air

we had stepped into the 1960s. A former professional

snowboarder, he was still lean and angular. During the
off-seasons of his life on the mountains, he had had an
Endless Summer period of traveling the world for ideal
surfing conditions. He was now much more settled,
married with a one-year-old daughter.
I barraged him with questions about his press as
he drove us into central Zurich, where we dropped off
my bags at my hotel and then zipped over to his studio.
Together with his partner Urs, Lex designed books and
catalogs for the European, and especially the Swiss,
art world. His studio was a large second-story space in
the inner courtyard of a city blockthe kind of studio
that had become impossible in New York: open, ample,
casual, a desk for every project. There I sat on an overstuffed couch and flipped through their recent books
each quite different from the next, seeming to extend
from the concept of the book itself, though linked by
fourteen-point type and wide margins. Most of the
work was done on a Risograph, which looked like a
high-end Xerox machine.

Lex tended to punctuate his sentences with the
word hey, which lent a life-affirming intensification
to his speech; the catch was that emphasis often fell on
down beats or rhetorical troughs where I wasnt expecting it. Were these micro-explosions perhaps a literal
translation of the emphasis patterns that characterized Switzerdeutsch, distinguishing it from German?
After ducking and swerving at the first few, I came to
enjoy and anticipate them, even crafting my own sentences to draw forth these heys from him at the least
expected moments. But that was a bit later.

Just then, in his studio, I was trying to convey my impressions about Switzerland from the plane: the allure
of Swiss modernization, the collective project that
seemed to drive Moir. No wonder he had felt such a
strong tug. Whether or not the heroism of modern
daily life in Switzerland still needed selling, it was what
one noticed first on entering Swiss air space, quietly
woven back into ways of being and into styles of building neither flashy nor self-aggrandizing but still utterly foreign in their ability to approach the diagram: the
functional building without excess or remainder
without contingency, abuttal, proximate debris. Just
that and no more. Without, in short, what sometimes
seemed like the basic and inescapable condition of
perceptiona periphery or frame that could always
undo a buildings project if it had not already been undone by some glaring failure in its basic construction.
Recently, I admitted to Lex, I had found myself giving
in to this expectation, and even cultivating it a little.
So it was instructional, if I could still use a word like
that, to fly into a country where such perception did
not seem to exist, where one could look straight on
and not constantly drag the camera around the ironic
margins.

We have some, hey, pretty terrible buildings here,
you know! Lexs gentle grounding of my wide-eyed
navet reminded me how ridiculous I must have soun
ded. Luckily, though, the conversation swung to my
research plans. He had already gathered materials on
Moir, on Swiss photography more generally, and had
suggestions about where else to look: the first stop was
the Landesmuseum. I was off before we revisited the
topic of Swiss architecture.

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27

the moir effect

swiss air

Apparently I was getting ahead of myself. What idiot

thinks that you cant find abuttal and squalor in
Switzerland? I had just walked through Zurichs red
light district on the way from Lexs studio, after all, and
there was no question that it was seedy. And beyond
such obvious examples there were, more to the point,
construction projects that failed both in themselves
and in their immediate environments. Right here in
the museum, across the street from the central train
station, an exhibit of Swiss photography from 1840 to
1960 featured close-ups of paving problems on Alpine
roads: small landsides of buckling and cracked asphalt.
Brief halts on the road to frictionless modern movement. And this by a photographer born all the way
back in 1864, Rudolf Zinggeler-Danioth. Was this a
specialty of Zinggeler-Danioths? Was he known as an
aesthete of buckling pavements and perhaps dislodged
roadside or tunnel masonry?
One could grant these the status of exceptions.
Or, I thought, returning to my old bent, one could
understand them as so many attempts to study early
failures for inoculation against subsequent ones. In
fact, even the educational focus on failed engineering
was rare. More characteristic were the dramatic results
of successful engineeringespecially at high altitudes.
By 1900, for instance, the Wehrli Brothers (Harry and
Bruno) had produced a series of iconic images of just
this unarrestable Swiss modernization. In my favorite
from the exhibition, a train speeds over a masonry
bridge in the middle ground, puffing black smoke. In
the foreground another bridgeboth straddling an
Alpine rivercarries a road that snakes through the
photograph, under the first bridge, around a cluster of

buildings, and then under two even larger arched

masonry bridges in the background. The most distant
of these in turn leads our eye up a manmade embankment, at the top of which another road runs along the
hillside toward dramatic mountains in the distance.
Wait thirty seconds, the photograph says, and another
vehicle will rush over another of these bridges. The
point here seemed to be not just that the Swiss could
get a train through this landscape, not just that they
could dominate such hostile transportation zones,
but rather that they could reticulate them with an infinite network of roads and suspended railways, turning eroding mountainsides and rushing Alpine streams
into a frictionless circulation system, a festival of potential movements. It seemed unfortunate, here, that the
stream had not yet been canalized into a vertical lock
system. But there was still time.
As powerful as such a photograph is, there was
something about this engineered terrain that required
greater height and distancea definitive liberation not
just from the immediate ground plane, or even the extrusion of that plane into a precipitous mountain peak
from which one might survey the surroundings. No,
ultimately, appropriate depiction of Swiss habitation
and transport required that one break free entirely from
the lowly earth in all its forms. It required the invention of another image-making machine: the airplane.
Here the great innovator was Walter Mittelholzer, who
pioneered aerial photography, or Luftbildfotographie,
and whose life was cut short by a climbing accident in
the Hochschwab in Austria in 1937. This was the kind
of modernist hagiographic death, however, that confirmed his commitment to extreme sports, extreme

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the moir effect

A Wehrli Brothers view of Swiss modernization.

technology, and the extreme views that could come

out of their combination. The first to cross Africa in a
plane, an early explorer of the North Pole, Mittelholzer did not only write exotic tales based on his travels.
He also focused on his native country, producing in
1928 the book Alpenflug, and cofounding in 1920 Ad
Astra Aero, which later became Swiss Air. As befits
such a personality, his image repertoire is split in two:
those of him (in front of his prop plane; in mid-air in
his biplane over the Bernese Alps, standing at attention, which is to say practicing discipline while cooling out for a second the massive powers that might

30

swiss air
suddenly precipitate a new series of miraculous actions)
and those by him (aerial photographs he took of the
towns and cities of Switzerland). Still used today, these
detached, floating views came to typify a new kind of
visual mastery associated with the plan.
Earlier in the day, before visiting the exhibition, I
had actually bought a book of aerial photographs in a
used bookstore without consciously registering why I
was so attracted to this mode of understanding Swiss
settlements. La Suisse vue davion, probably from the
early 1960s, was a collection of oversaturated, almost
edible-looking, Technicolor views (in fact produced
by Mittelholzers company, Swiss Air): the falls of the
Rhine; the oxbow at Bremergarten; the great dam on
lake Gruyre; an audacious bridge over the Sitter River;
the switchback route at the Maloja pass; the port of
Basel; the Zurich train yards; assorted plowed or
recently harvested fields; winter landscapes in the
Thur valley; lake towns in Ticino; views of the principal Swiss cities; and, finally, a series of colonies dhabi
tation, one in the suburbs of Zurich, another at
Wattwil. It was these, paradoxically, that most struck
me. At Wattwil, identical brown houses, with peaked
roofs that extend into small garages, are organized
around a slightly squished oval road. The inner lawn
is the color of a fresh avocado interior. Darker greens,
purples, and yellows punctuate hedges, gardens. Again,
empirical reality has been herded inside the security
of the diagram. And, above all an attractive diagram:
the Swiss made suburbanization seem like a viable
project. How did they do it?

31

the moir effect

Wattwil in La Suisse vue davion.

A tap on the back from one of the docents broke the

spell: You would like to speak to the curatorDr.
Shaw, I present Dr. Dieter Bachmann. Congratulations on the exhibition, Dr. Bachmann. I particularly
appreciate seeing the Wehrli Brotherss views and Walter
Mittleholzers plane photography. A tall grey-haired
man in a white suitchief curator of Aufbruch in die
Gegenwart: Die Schweiz in Fotografien 18401960
bestowed a paternal smile of satisfaction on me, through
thick spectacles Well, Bruno and Harry Wehrli were
pioneersthey took photography out of the middleclass parlor and into the transforming landscape.
You are working on a project about Swiss photography,
Dr. Shaw? A school group was making its way out of
the room and I waited a moment for their squeaky
sneakers to subside before answering. Yes, Dr. Bachmann, and while I love what youve included in this
exhibition, Im particularly interested in Ernst Moir.

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swiss air
The paternal glow vanished and a glacial chill rearranged his features. I dont believe Ive heard of this
photographer. You say hes Swiss? I knew Moir had
been resented for some time for botching a government
commission, but this was 114 years later. So I was not
quite prepared. Yeeeaaahhh, I began slowly, waiting
for him to jump in and relieve me. But after the word
stretched to what became an embarrassing length I
was forced to continue. He worked publicly from the
1870s until the late 1890s, then went underground until the end of his life. But he was pretty well known in
his day: Alpine architecture, bridges, tunnels. A bit
like the Wehrli brothers, in fact, but even more of an
anticipation of Russian Constructivism and New Objectivity. Mr. Shaw, if that were so I would certainly
know of him. I excused myself as politely as I could
and, with his hard stare still burning a hole in my
back, walked out the courtyard of the Landesmuseum
and across the Limmat into the old section of town.

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the moir archive

The smell of Knorr soup wafted out onto the pedestrian street. There at Mnstergasse 26, as I had seen it
in 2001, was Moirs house, still overlooking the Markt
gasse Square, still lacking a plaque. But emphatically
there. When I climbed the stairs at the city archive in
an hour or so, I could count on his papers arriving in a
grey rectangular archive box, marked MOI on the outside in all caps, and stored against the southern wall of
the reading room. What if I simply asked Dr. Bachmann
to accompany me to the archive? Or perhaps I could
return tomorrow to the Landesmuseum with Xeroxes
of a few key documents: I knew the machine on which
I could do it, in the hallway just beyond the reading
room, where a topographic painting of the city hung,
somewhat impervious to view, since one couldnt back
up sufficiently to take it all in. The machines copies
were 30 cents and the archivist would count my change
afterwards. But perhaps I was framing the problem
incorrectly.

My article did mention the fact that the Swiss government had descended upon the photographers house,
stolen his page layouts, and moird him out of history. But in the context of my previous research this
had seemed primarily an act of revenge for ruining the
publicly funded commission. Thus it appeared as if
the responsibility for hushing up Moirs name had to
do first with Moirs own embarrassment (hence his
withdrawal from public), second with his familys re
luctance to have their name associated with a famous
technological failure, and finally, only incidentally, with
the Swiss governments reediting of images of the photographer. But the curators studied ignorance seemed
to point to a different, stranger, ultimately more active
role for the Swiss government. Was it possible that the
Swiss state sought not just to punish Moir, but in fact
to unname himto turn his proper name into a kind
of brand without an origin, an effect, not an empirical
person, and certainly not a Swiss person?

To have developed the banking system that has,
from time immemorial, laundered endless sums of
tainted money, even directly conspired in helping the
Nazis hide their war lootthese are moral problems
that can be generalized, blurred beyond the resolution
at which its easy to point fingers at specific humans.
Swiss banks process money, such a line of thinking
goes; who can control all of the social implications of
currency? So a few clients are reprehensible. With time
and distance, their features merge into the general image
of moneys circulation, slightly dirty but unavoidable.
And so this abstract cynicism launders the image of
Swiss banks too. This is naturalized blurrinessexpec
ted and ultimately relieving. But to have pioneered a

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35

T he Moir Archiv e
4
Must I, by the way, reproach myself for being
most deeply affected by human influences
when they reach me through the vibrations
of inherited things?

Rilke, letter from the Palazzo Salis, Soglio