Jules Spinatsch

From Documentary Training to the Conditions Around the Event

Spinatsch was born in Davos in 1964, a town now widely associated with the World Economic Forum. In the 1990s he studied documentary photography at the International Center of Photography in New York and worked in photojournalism before turning, around 2000, toward long-term conceptual projects. Engadin Art Talks outlines his activity as a photographer, editor, and lecturer and his movement from documentary training toward research-based work^*1. Lars Müller Publishers similarly describes his shift from 1990s press photography toward long-term projects spanning politics, tourism, and surveillance^*8.

This transition did not mean that Spinatsch stopped photographing political events. The mechanism by which news photography selects a “center of the event”—leaders, demonstrators, speeches, clashes—became the subject itself. In a video interview, Collection Pictet explains that, while the media concentrates on actors, Spinatsch observes the general visual conditions occupied by political, economic, and social power^*2. Photography shifted from a tool for obtaining one representative image of an event to a method for investigating the apparatuses and operations that make the event visible.

Temporary Discomfort: Summit Space Produced by Security Infrastructure

Temporary Discomfort is a long-term project following cities transformed by venues, fences, checkpoints, surveillance, temporary structures, and security around the World Economic Forum in Davos and G8-related meetings. Lars Müller Publishers describes the book as five chapters of photographs and documents spanning Davos, Genoa, New York, Évian, and Geneva, tracing the temporary pressure political gatherings place on public space^*7. Publication material from the Centre de la photographie Genève records that the 2004 book was produced with the institution’s collaboration^*19.

1854 / British Journal of Photography discusses the series as a response to the photojournalistic consensus that getting closer to the “center of the action” brings the photographer closer to truth^*12. By turning away from leaders’ handshakes toward fences, cameras, roads, and backstage infrastructure that keep them secure and separated, Spinatsch makes what normally forms the background of the news into the subject. The series asks both who becomes visible and what systems are built to show some people while screening off others.

The Gulf War and Sophie Ristelhueber: Why Spinatsch Moved Away from Photojournalism

Spinatsch himself cites the 1990–91 Gulf War and Sophie Ristelhueber’s photobook Fait as catalysts for seeking another visual method beyond photojournalism. CNN’s night-vision footage and postwar press images of “victory,” he recalls, strongly controlled the image of the war, while Ristelhueber’s photographs of tracks in the desert and remnants of weapons offered another way of seeing^*21. This experience makes the later surveillance panoramas more than technical experiments. Spinatsch works with the contradiction that even exhaustive recording can miss what matters, examining photographic evidence from the side of the system that produces it.

Surveillance Panorama: Delegating the Shutter to the Machine

In 2003, Spinatsch began in Davos the method later called the Surveillance Panorama Projects, using a computer-controlled network camera. His documentation for Vienna MMIX explains how the camera is programmed to scan a space in fixed directions and numbers of exposures, after which the artist no longer chooses the instant of the shutter^*17. Collection Pictet likewise describes this semiautomation as distinct from conventional photography, in which the artist decides from moment to moment “what to see”^*2.

Authorship appears in advance through decisions about camera placement, shooting interval, scanning range, and later arrangement. As a result, ceilings, equipment, empty seats, backs, and accidental gestures—the details a news camera pursuing important figures would discard—accumulate under the same rules. Spinatsch’s own documentation explains that the method works against the fast, spectacular production of mass-media imagery by preserving large quantities of overlooked detail^*17.

Vienna MMIX: Folding Eight Hours into a Single Space

For Vienna MMIX, two programmed cameras scanned the 2009 Vienna Opera Ball over the course of a night. Collection Pictet records 17,352 images taken at three-second intervals from 8:32 p.m. to 5:17 a.m., later presented as a roughly 35-meter, 360-degree panorama^*3. The University of Chicago Press bibliography describes the photobook as a two-volume structure: the first contains more than 10,000 images as a chronological sequence, while the second selects just over seventy^*10.

From a distance, the installation appears to be a continuous interior panorama, yet adjacent fragments were photographed at different times. David Campany discusses the work as an intersection of multiple systems of seeing involving surveillance, power, spectacle, time, and space^*11. Frieze similarly notes that two computer-controlled cameras produced a mosaic of roughly ten thousand images over eight hours, with unattended recording making even private moments among the participants visible^*13. The panorama connects different moments within one spatial field and makes them appear like a complete view of a single instant. Its apparent comprehensiveness exposes surveillance imagery as an accumulation of fragmented time.

Turning Surveillance Apparatus into a Means of Production

Spinatsch does not simply photograph surveillance cameras from the outside; he incorporates an analogous form of automated scanning into his own production. Collection Pictet notes that, in Vienna MMIX, fragments recorded without the subjects’ knowledge make the ubiquity of security apparatuses and the contraction of privacy difficult to ignore^*3. Le Mois de la Photo Montréal similarly describes the work as an eight-hour scan of the ball with a telephoto camera close to surveillance technology^*18.

From Panorama to Panopticon: The More That Is Photographed, the Further the Whole Recedes

The Centre de la photographie Genève, which first exhibited Temporary Discomfort – Chapter IV PULVER GUT in 2003, describes the later semiautomatic photography as a “double-edged” method. The enormous images accumulate enough information for handwritten notes to remain legible, while the same technology can readily become an apparatus for total spatial surveillance; the institution observes that there is only “one step” from panorama to panopticon^*26. Spinatsch does not assume that delegating vision to a machine will produce an objective total view. His own texts make a central point of the fact that even thousands or tens of thousands of images made under the same rules do not guarantee complete comprehension^*24. Automated photography undermines the surveillance system’s claim to “see everything” through an excess of fragments.

The critical force of this method does not depend on opposing bad surveillance images to good art photography. The same automation becomes surveillance in a police or institutional setting, scenic transmission in tourism, and panorama in art. As Camera Austria’s comparison of Vienna MMIX with stage photography and model books suggests, the work has been received across photographic genres as an image that edits time through rules^*14.

Snow Management: The Alpine Landscape as Managed Production

Snow Management began in 2001 and follows ski resorts remade at night through artificial snow, grooming machines, heavy equipment, and lighting. The Prix Pictet series page brings together several works from 2004–08^*4. Collection Pictet reads the nocturnal landscapes, occupied only by snow cannons and grooming machines, as the final stage in “producing” nature to meet the demands of the tourism industry^*5.

Snow Management treats landscape as a process of management and production. Tourist photography consumes the white mountain as a symbol of nature, while that whiteness is maintained by machinery, electricity, water, and labor. As with the security infrastructure of Temporary Discomfort, operations normally hidden behind the finished appearance of a place move to the center of the image.

Welcome to Photostudio Titlis and Davos Is a Verb: Tracing the Production of Tourist Images

Spinatsch works not only with photographs he makes himself but also with images produced daily by the tourism industry. Welcome to Photostudio Titlis examines the system of souvenir photography in a mountaintop studio; Collection Pictet presents the work in relation to a tourist site’s self-image and the standardized form of the souvenir portrait^*6. In Davos Is a Verb, he examines his hometown as a place defined not just by winter scenery but by corporations, brands, conferences, and services. Lars Müller Publishers describes the publication as a combination of photographs, documents, and texts built around the idea that the city’s name itself becomes a kind of “verb” for political and economic activity^*9.

Across these works runs an interest in the institutions that produce images behind the surface of a place. Souvenir photographs desired by tourists, images of leaders sought by the media, and surveillance images required by institutions serve different purposes, yet each makes certain subjects visible while pushing others into the background. Spinatsch turns attention to this process of selection and includes within the work the social purpose for which an image is made.

Photobooks and Monumental Installations: Making Quantity Itself Legible

Spinatsch’s method becomes difficult to see when the work is reduced to a representative single image. The Vienna MMIX book prints images numbering in the tens of thousands as a chronological sequence, while the exhibition version unfolds as a monumental band around the walls^*10. Photography Now’s exhibition and publication record likewise documents his movement between photobooks and large-scale installations^*15. The official website organizes the work since Temporary Discomfort and the Surveillance Panorama Projects by project, reinforcing the fact that the operative unit is the system as a whole rather than the isolated photograph^*16.

From the “Decisive Moment” to the “Photographic Protocol”

Spinatsch’s place in photographic history cannot be reduced to the subject of surveillance society. As 1854 notes, his method is a specific response to a photojournalistic tradition that approaches the event and entrusts truth to one forceful image^*12. In the panoramas, the camera moves every three seconds without judging importance. Meaning emerges afterward, when the accumulated fragments are read, arranged, and compared.

With digital photography, images became not only pictures made individually by people but data continuously generated by machines used in surveillance, transportation, tourism, and research. Spinatsch incorporated the operation of those imaging systems into artistic form early in that transition, recasting documentary authorship and evidence as problems of the photographic system itself.

Reception as Post-Documentary Photography

Temporary Discomfort received the Prix du Livre at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2005, and works including Vienna MMIX have continued to be exhibited internationally in photography and contemporary-art contexts. Material from Le Mois de la Photo Montréal summarizes the BMW Photography Prize at Paris Photo, the Arles award, and exhibitions at MoMA, Tate Modern, SFMOMA, and other institutions^*18. Collection Pictet also holds several series and presents his work as contemporary photography spanning politics, tourism, and surveillance^*20.

The significance of the work does not rest on a claim that machine-made images are objective. Automated images also carry the politics of installation, programming, purpose, and selection. Spinatsch makes those conditions visible and places the photographer inside the same system. In an era of mass automated image production, the structure of his work insists on asking which apparatus made an image, according to whose rules, and what span of time it rendered visible.

Panoramic Vision and the Contradictions of Surveillance

Media scholar Alexander Streitberger discusses Spinatsch’s Surveillance Panorama in Quaderni as a case linking the history of nineteenth-century panoramas to digital surveillance. Early photographic panoramas also stitched together images made at different moments and presented them as a simultaneous total view; in Temporary Discomfort and Panopticon, those seams expand to the scale of thousands of images^*27.

Streitberger emphasizes that, while systems such as Google Street View suppress distortions and color shifts at their joins to create a smooth space, Spinatsch intentionally retains blur, distortion, color differences, and temporal discontinuities^*27. The article places this work alongside Mario Santamaría, Michiel van Bakel, and Hito Steyerl as forms of “counter-surveillance panorama.” Their position is defined by destabilizing, from within, the continuous total view promised by surveillance systems through the multiplicity of fragments and seams that make the image.

Cartier-Bresson and Muybridge: The Decisive Moment Versus Scanning

Using 10,008 images from the Vienna Opera Ball as an example, Spinatsch’s project documentation explains that mechanically recording everything with equal weight still fails to produce a total understanding. As a conceptual alternative to Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” it describes a camera that moves through fixed horizontal and vertical steps over an extended period^*24. Existing Vienna MMIX documentation also connects the method to Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential photography, since both divide time into smaller units and later assemble them into a visual field instead of privileging a single instant^*17. In the Davos work, a remotely controlled camera made more than 2,176 images over three hours, showing the construction of the security zone rather than the main event^*22. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art likewise describes the method as a reversal of the same surveillance technology used by security authorities^*23. Where Muybridge made motion analyzable through sequential images, Spinatsch turns the opposite paradox into a work: the more information accumulates, the more the complete picture recedes.

The 2026 Retrospective: Thirty-Five Years of Chance and Control

The Kunstmuseum Graubünden retrospective that opened on August 22, 2026, frames thirty-five years of work as an inquiry moving from directly observed documentary photography toward semiautomatic imaging. It identifies chance and control, power, authorship, and the instability of the photographic image as central concerns^*25. The surveillance panorama is thus being reconsidered not as a short-lived digital technique but as an ongoing method for asking who sees and who can be said to have made an image.

The issues highlighted by the 2026 retrospective were already present in the work’s early reception in 2003. After exhibiting the first Surveillance Panorama that year, the Centre de la photographie Genève organized a 2018–19 retrospective of semiautomatic photography and noted that, despite a change in equipment from webcams to SLR cameras, the same principle remained: the artist determines the duration and scanning range, while individual moments are delegated to the machine^*26. Once the novelty of the technology has faded, the enduring questions concern how far a photographer can transfer judgment into prior rules and who will read the large quantities of images those rules generate—and how.