Karlheinz Weinberger Libri

In 1958, Zürich photographer Karlheinz Weinberger captured Halbstarke (rebel) Jimmy Oechslin, marking the beginning of a collection focused on young Swiss teenagers. This encounter sparked Weinberger’s fascination with outsiders and nonconformists within Switzerland's conservative environment. The photographs in this first volume provide a rare glimpse into a bygone era that, while appearing quaint today, represented a bold statement at the time. Dressing in jeans, sporting beehive hairdos, and wearing chains was as provocative as blasting Buddy Holly or Jerry Lee Lewis on a quiet Swiss Sunday. Discovered by the art scene shortly before his death in 2006, Weinberger's extensive collection of tens of thousands of prints, slides, and negatives has been meticulously archived over the past decade, revealing many never-before-seen images. This inspired the publication of thematic volumes, designed to echo the glossy entertainment magazines of the era. Following the release of Halbstarke as Volume #1, Sturm & Drang publishers plan to explore topics such as sports, tattoos, and his work with biker gangs and rockers in the 1970s and 80s. Each first edition will be limited to 1200 copies.

Karlheinz Weinberger’s day job may have been relatively uneventful—working in a Siemens warehouse—but the photos he took in his spare time are anything but conformist. Weinberger’s passion, and the focus of this book, is the rebel youth of 1950s and ’60s Switzerland, who channeled American rock-’n’-roll culture and made it their own with their rolled-up jeans and denim jackets, bouffant hairdos, striped T-shirts, and customized belts boasting images of Elvis and James Dean. Weinberger’s lusty, free-spirited and self-confident portraits posit the defiant attitude of youth as a response to the conservative post-war era. Swiss Rebels also includes homoerotic images of rockers, bikers, construction workers and athletes, many of whom occupy positions outside of social norms. This publication is the first to present an overview of Weinberger’s provocative oeuvre

Commencing his career in the 1950s as a self-taught photographer working primarily for the gay underground Zurich club and magazine Der Kreis, Karlheinz Weinberger (1921-2006) took candid shots of lovers, friends and strangers on the street with an overt erotic investment in his subjects. He soon developed a fixation with the working-class youth culture known as the "Halbstark" (or "half strong"). Its members demonstrated their anti-establishment stance with embellished outfits of denim and leather, in an exaggerated and homemade version of the popularized American bad-boy style of the time. In his stark, posed photographs of these young rebels, Weinberger focuses on individual figures, exploring both a personal erotic obsession and the cultural symbolism of blue jeans, whose scarcity in post war Switzerland implied not just a fashion statement but a badge of pride. This publication reproduces a rare portfolio of these works that Weinberger designed himself in the mid-1950s.