Beatrice Aerni

Beatrice Aerni (b. 1962, Zürich) is a Swiss photographer whose disciplined analogue practice has, over more than three decades, refined a single sustained subject: the unpeopled room and the surface of water. Trained in Zürich during the early 1980s, she works exclusively in black and white, printing by hand on fibre-based paper to editions she keeps deliberately small. Her cameras are large-format and slow; exposures often run to several minutes, gathering the faint, even light of corridors, stairwells, archives, swimming halls and drained municipal pools, or the lake at dawn before the city stirs. Aerni waits for absence. The figure is never present, yet the spaces she records remain charged with recent use — a damp tile, a chair pushed back, mist settling on motionless water. Her tonal register is narrow and grey, her framing frontal and unhurried, owing as much to the New Objectivity tradition as to a quieter Northern attention to interior stillness. Widely exhibited across Switzerland and Northern Europe, she has shown at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, the Fotostiftung Schweiz and the Kunsthaus Zürich, and is held in major public collections. She lives and works in Zürich, close to the lake that recurs throughout her work.

I photograph rooms after the people have left them, and water before anyone has touched it. The long exposure does the patient work; I only choose where to stand and how long to wait. What stays on the paper is not emptiness but the residue of presence — the room still holding its breath.