Ernst Scheidegger / Alberto Giacometti

Numerous books published by Scheidegger & Spiess are dedicated to the life and work of the world-famous artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66). This is due to the fact that the founder of our publishing house, the Swiss photographer, photo editor, book designer, gallery owner and publisher Ernst Scheidegger (1923-2016) had a close friendship with Giacometti and photographed him again and again over many years – in his studio in Paris or in his native Bergell.

The two met in 1943, when the twenty-year-old Scheidegger was assigned to border duty as a Swiss soldier and met Giacometti in Maloja, who had returned home from Paris because of the war. This was the beginning of a long friendly exchange, which Ernst Scheidegger was to memorialize in 1990 in the book Traces of a Friendship.

Scheidegger had also conceived a volume on the artist’s oeuvre as the very first book in the newly founded “Verlag Ernst Scheidegger, Zürich” in 1962: Jean Genet: Alberto Giacometti combined an essay by the French author, which had first appeared in a magazine in 1957, with eleven of his own photographs from the famous sculptor’s Paris studio. Thus, Scheidegger’s photographs and Giacometti’s art were, so to speak, ingrained in the publisher’s cradle and have remained distinctive cornerstones of our program profile to this day.

Most of the publisher’s English-language Giacometti books are now out of print. Scheidegger’s homage Traces of a Friendship and the introduction Alberto Giacometti: Drawings and Watercolours however, are consistent long sellers.