Morgan Is Sad Today

Morgan Is Sad Today is one of the most unconventional and unwieldy photo books in Swiss photographic history. It was conceived in the late 1960s by the two young photographers Robert Müller (1942-2018) and Jean-Pierre Maurer (*1942), but - as a print-ready maquette - remained lying around for almost 50 years until it was discovered by the publisher Patrick Frey in 2015 and published in virtually unaltered form. The work is of a startling radicalism. Wild and exuberant, it evokes the attitude to life of young people who were convinced they were setting out for a better and freer world. This departure was accompanied by a frivolous dismantling of the establishment and lusty criticism of bourgeois conventions - and was also reflected in the photography.

Müller and Maurer combined over 100 images into an associative round dance full of riddles and breaks, whereby it usually remains unclear who took the individual shots. Morgan Is Sad Today is, in a sense, a collective product into which raw material from other sources (for example press photos or comics) was also incorporated. The image sequences move between staging and reality, remain fragmentary or spill out over the viewers: a stream of consciousness, sometimes closer to a Nouvelle Vague film, then again like the shrill live act of a rock concert. Again and again, the rules of "good" photography are thrown overboard. Extreme contrasts, gimmicks with blur and coarse grain, bizarre and spontaneous happenings, carefully planned absurdities in the studio as well as alienation beyond recognition are part of the repertoire of an aesthetic of resistance that defies "reasonable" logic. The two photographers were able to win the well-known Italian designer Ettore Sottsass as the author for an accompanying essay; however, he did not provide any image-related explanations, but described the zeitgeist of the 1960s just as freely and extravagantly as the photographers - a manifesto against the hollow pathos and lies of politics and a plea for a life in harmony with the universe. For the printed version of 2015, Sandro Fischli also contributed an illuminating text.

With the title of their book, Maurer and Müller alluded to the film Morgan - A Suitable Case For Treatment. In this 1966 English flick by Karel Reisz, the eccentric young painter Morgan wants to use crazy ideas and his gorilla shenanigans to get back his wife, who has separated from him. The freedom of the outsider collides with the rigid conventions of the upper class; in the end, Morgan finds himself in an insane asylum, where he continues to live his dreams and Marxist ideals unshakably. Filmed in the crude style of Free Cinema, the comedy blurs the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between seriousness and comedy. At one point the protagonist sings to himself, "Morgan is sad today, sadder than yesterday..." - Is he sad because his plan is not succeeding? Or because humanity is still wrestling with the power of evil instead of finding happiness in a world of love and peace?

"There was a universal consensus that everything we did was right and just - and that we would win," Hunter S. Thompson wrote in his 1971 cult book Scare and Fear in Las Vegas, referring to the youth of the 1960s. "We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave" - an apt image for the mood also conveyed by Morgan Is Sad Today.

The works on display are part of a generous donation by Jean-Pierre Maurer; they were added to the collection of the Fotostiftung Schweiz in 2022.