"Please conjure up whatever it means for you at this moment"—the introduction to the game is simple and clear. For over 30 years, the Swiss artist Ingeborg Lüscher has been inviting friends, neighbors, and time and time again fellow artists to play her "magician" game. The participants decide on the place and the props, while the leader of the game stands behind her camera and takes 18 shots of which she selects nine, and arranges them in a fixed order. Thus, without any taxonomy, a collection of contemporary self-representations has grown up, which have long since taken on the characteristics of an original portrait gallery.
The "Magician Photos" occupy a central place in the work of Ingeborg Lüscher. They are her oldest and most extensive project, still not complete today, and really never capable of being finished. This artist's book brings together more than a hundred selected "sessions" ranging over three decades—from James Lee Byars to
Andy Warhol, from
Paul Thek to
Lawrence Weiner.
Born 1936 in Freiberg, Ingeborg Lüscher lives and works in Tegna (Switzerland).
