┐ Arnold Odermatt, an ordinary life └

Hors service (handtücher)

“Arnold Odermatt’s photographs are essentially forensic. For over 30 years he was a Swiss traffic policeman who managed to incorporate his hobby into his job. His original intention was for the photographs to augment his written reports, to illuminate and help reconstruct the how and why of the accidents he attended in his duties. In this light, the peculiar pedestrianism of the images, instead of being a quaintly interesting Swiss-Twin-Peaksy thing, becomes merely a policeman’s objectivity. There is no drama or discernible commentary; the subject of his naive eye is the aftermath of vehicular accidents – broken cars. These form the mainstay of the show: there are cars in fields, inverted cars, cars at weird angles, cars in water, cars in snow. Cars bisected, peeled, foreshortened, torn and elongated. Instead of being striking, many of these images are surprisingly dull. (…)” via Joe Laniado, in Frieze