Biography
The photographer Edouard Curchod has been documenting the Montreux Jazz Festival for 40 years.
After graduating from the School of Photography in Vevey in 1970, Edouard got his first job with a photographer in Yverdon. There he received his first advertising assignments for magazines and journals. To further his education, Edouard Curchod joined a lithography company and learned the technique of photolithography. In 1974 he started working for the famous magazine “Le Nouvel Illustré” as a chief photographer. He was responsible for the illustration of the newspaper and led a team of photographers. In 1977, he followed the preparations for the wine festival in Vevey for a special edition.
After this experience, he decided to start his own business the following year and opened his first studio in Vevey, mainly for press photography. He continued to work for Nouvel Illustré and also worked as a freelance photographer for weekly and daily newspapers, such as 24heure, le Matin, la Feuille d’Avis de Vevey and many others.
In 2001, he began to experiment with digital photography, but for a few years he also worked with analog technique until 2003, when he decided to go digital. This new medium allowed an improvement in quality and brought him a new freedom in his photography. His curiosity drove him to constantly improve and develop his professional abilities.
As a contemporary witness of the current events on the Vaud Riviera, he followed the actors of life in the region. Above all, his documentation of the Montreux Jazz Festival became famous, but also from the annual “Schwingen” (traditional Swiss wrestling) to the building fire, from the Chaplin family to the traffic accident, from the start of school to the closure of a factory, all areas that make up the life of a region were photographed with the same passion and eye.
In 2014, a first exhibition at the Vevey Visual Arts Festival “IMAGE 14 paid tribute to the work of Edouard Curchod in 29 stations. A 2nd exhibition was organized by the festival under the title “Feuille d’Avis de Vevey”. It showed a selection of photographs published in the local newspaper in the 1980s. The 3rd exhibition was a panorama of the St. Martin Fair of 1898. It was a 2 meters tall and 12 meters long reconstruction with postcards and negatives on glass plates. It showed his passion for history of photography and gave an insight into his collection of old photographs.
