The book was exceptional when it was published in 1989 and in the meantime has not lost any of its uniqueness. It has a slightly elongated, upright format, measuring 37 cm, with a breadth of 29.5 cm—that is, it is a format that at most allows semi-automatic processing. The book jacket is white, a warm white tending slightly toward off-white, an almost warm tone. Thick, firm paper has been chosen for it, with a matt laminate or finish, and typography alone decorates the front and the spine with the words: Hans Danuser – IN VIVO – Verlag Lars Müller. The back cover features a small-format photograph in the upper center, a quote of sorts from the book, following the numbering of the book it is figure III 10 as the key photograph in the Medicine I series, that is, it is the tenth photograph in the third section that was “photographed in anatomy and pathology instruction and research laboratories.” An autopsied corpse lies on a gurney, partly visible, partly concealed, partly intact, partially dissected. The gurney is presumably the draw of a mortuary refrigerator, thrust into the picture from the upper right to the lower left, as if someone had opened up a modern grave in a metal refrigerator and shone a dim light on a frozen body. It is a tiny reference, a symbolic image for the project in its entirety, a displaced frontispiece. The book has been bound in light gray linen with “IN VIVO” impressed on the cover. The endpapers are deep red, the only color in the whole book. The title page is the same as the book jacket.

Then the book begins with the ninety-three tritone prints, dividing them into seven sections, with only the minimal addition of the numbering by the graphic artist and publisher Lars Müller: the Roman numerals are for the series and the Arabic numerals for the individual prints. The vertical and horizontal formats of the images have been arranged as if Lars Müller had, with a slight movement of his hand, shifted them from the center, pushing the horizontal formats slightly upward, the upright formats either to the left or the right, so that the images better harmonize with the large format of the paper. Throughout the entire book we find a cleverly calculated system of pages with images interspersed with empty pages, sequences that follow the exhibition arrangement and vice versa. An insert lists all the technical details as well as the titles of the series and the individual photographs, from I to VII, with series sizes comprising 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, and 18 photographs. The lithographs in the book are from Straumann AG in Dielsdorf and among the very first to be produced digitally, which Waser Druck in Buchs did not print in the usual duotone but in three colors, called tritone. The bookbindery put the sheets together and bound them. The combination of lithography, printing, and art paper is remarkable, and even today still superb. In many of the photographs black tones are so predominant that the grayscale does not exceed ten to twenty percent. The other printers and publishers could not take on the job. Photographs, graphic art, lithography, printing, and binding here produce a coherency that is extremely rare. Accordingly the book won a number of awards.

The special formal, graphic, and technical characteristics of the book correspond with Hans Danuser’s ninety-three photographs—exceptional on account of their overall artistic qualities and content. When first presented to the public they were immediately a sensation, and even today they fascinate and have a unique significance. In vivo—the world in terms of flesh, both of the dead and the living. In vivo and in vitro—the visualization of power, knowledge, capital, and violence in disturbing imagery that visualizes in an increasingly abstract world. Before we proceed to the particulars of the project, however, I would like to unroll like a rug the topography of photography and art, the chapters they went through and the situation at the time when the individual series for In vivo were produced in the period from 1980 to 1989, to be finally published as a single cohesive project and mounted for the first time as an exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau.

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In the 1950s the penchant for certainties began to totter. The horrors of World War II had been incommensurably great. It was impossible to proceed as usual, as if nothing had occurred, to dabble around with the same old devices as before—even if society, its institutions, and even our innate indolence attempted with all their might to return to life as normal, to reintroduce and reestablish themselves and the values of yesteryear. World War II had made individuals too much aware that they were henceforth left to their own devices, at least in those countries that had been hardest hit by it. Faith in the state, its institutions, the Church, in the diverse moral and legal means of regulation was shaken severely, the Freudian superego left deeply disturbed.

Correspondingly, a succession of sweeping changes shaped the paths pursued by art and photography in the 1970s. For example, documentary photography became increasingly subjective. The parameters gradually changed. Objective presentation of the world morphed into a subjective perception of it; photographic truth shifted clearly toward authenticity, objective truth to the authenticity of the subject, to the authenticity of the photographer. Visual exploration, knowledge, and representation of the world shifted to a dialog, to reflecting on media or self. The photographers became visible in the image, so to speak. They came out of cover and bared themselves, discarded the general’s vantage and joined the action in the field, took part. They became part of the image, and the world part of them. Documentary photography changed, growing more radical in stages, evolving into a subjective, artistic statement.

We can discern this trend to subjectivity in art too, in which art becomes embodied, defined in spatial and temporal relations, in happenings and performance, the movements that gained in momentum since the end of the 1950s. These were the first steps toward the dissolution of stringent pictorial conceptions, negating notions of art as synonymous with painting on square or rectangular canvases—framed or unframed—and united with the idea of the sublime, eternal, ecstatic, such as last found in abstract expressionism. And we can discern the trend to subjectivity in the crucial questions of identity of the time: Who am I? What is my role in life? What roles am I forced to adopt? Crucial questions that acquired a new urgency in face of the loss of faith in the authorities of the outside world, in outer absolutes. In post-war feminism we find the basic model for many debates on identity. Oppression of women is socially controlled by ascribing an allegedly natural, but in fact a socially controlled, unequal role to women, which is a key factor in shaping their identities already at a very young age. Women now question identification with traditional models and seek a new identity, combined with a transvaluation of values. Prescribing and assigning identities began to be viewed as a key means of exerting power within society, while inventing own identities became a form of resistance and opposition. Manifestations of this model could be more or less radical. All the other groups involved in identity discussions, such as the gay scene and POC (people of color), pursued this model.

Happenings and performance not only led to the identity movement of the 1960s and 70s but also to art and photography gradually becoming conceptual, to the dissolution of traditional notions of art and images in their various manifestations. For many artists this was a decade of radical departures—from the abstract, pure modes of design seeking objectivity and their conceptual superstructure; from the artwork as a closed, absolute entity; from the precept of the material-specificity of art; and from categories of style. It was also the time for the negation of greatness in form, narrative, or universal truths. They were being replaced by insight, thoughtfulness, probing and plumbing, questioning, trying out, searching, by conceptual reflection on perception, on the terms under which we act, research of the media used by the artist. Photography is mostly used “industrially” in conceptual art, to quote Ed Ruscha with this term. Not the fine arts of photography, not the great powers of design in a square frame, but instead photography utilized as scraps of reality.

We can illustrate the conceptual turn in photography by tracing the evolution of landscape photography in the United States—the shift from notions of landscape as sacred, other-worldly, as a pantheistic notion of nature, to viewing landscape as real, factual, and an economic factor in the 1960s and 70s. Photographers turned about 180 degrees. They no longer went out to look at nature, but looked back into the suburbs, the rampantly growing urban environments that were eating up the countryside. Suburbia was born again, now in images. New Topographics no longer sees the world through the eyes of a subject, nurtured by the spirit of adventure of its author and his ideas of utopia. Instead it discards utopian ideas and scrutinizes, investigates what is happening to urban, suburban, and rural environments. Its photographs are investigations of new urbanism as an inner and outer reality. Its photographers and artists prioritize the purity of images and the congruence of form and content as critical instruments, replacing the illusion of artistic proficiency in photography with the illusion of mechanistic description. By this means they force us, the viewers of the photographs and the viewing subjects, to adopt a fundamentally new role—to look uncompromisingly and unsentimentally at the world before our eyes, at the world around us as it is now.

However, many photographers experienced the 1970s as a decade of great uncertainty, a time of identity crisis and radical change in photography. Conventional notions and uses of photography were now, for the first time, under extreme pressure. For the outside world photography was in the process of losing its role at the forefront in reporting about the world to live television. Internally it was in danger of being eclipsed by the first great wave of commercial photography, and art, too, began to explore photography, claim it for itself. Additionally the truth claim of photography was rapidly losing ground. Structuralist theories proclaimed the “death of the author.” This contested the notion of an autonomous subject that is sovereign and determines its actions and instead put forward that a whole system is involved, and that we move in and with this system, are dependent on it, and are neither autonomous nor independent.

Seen in this light, the three major characteristics of photographic design at the time (black negative frame, push processing to obtain printable negatives in low-light conditions, extreme wide angle) seem to evidence a strong reaction, appear to participate in a visual counter strategy, a kind of photographic counterreformation. It was expected that photography appear as authentic and real as possible. Proximity, immediacy, and no frills were expected of it, and it was by no means allowed that one distort the original intention in the post-processing. This became the credo of a visual counterreformation. Reality and authenticity were suggested by making the grain visible, imbuing the medium with a rough, hands-on quality, and enlarging the image in a way so that it was detailed and crisp. The black edge underscored the aspect of the personal view of an autonomous subject. This appears to have been a new way of expressing a certain helplessness or refusal in coming to terms with the increasing complexity of the world and a systemic world view. 

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Against this backdrop, Hans Danuser began with his major project, which he concluded nine years later in 1989 with the book and the exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau. Initially in a searching, probing, experimental way towards the end of the 1970s, in the 1980s finally he began with the A-Energy project, “photographed in atomic power plants, reactor research facilities and interim storage of highly radioactive waste.” Thus he started out with a highly controversial, heatedly debated topic. As we can well remember, the planned Kaiseraugst nuclear power plant in the Canton of Aargau fell through in face of the intense opposition among the local population and highly political environmentalists. The municipality of Kaiseraugst was long under discussion as the site for a nuclear power plant. According to Wikipedia, the most spectacular part of the controversy was an occupation of the site for eleven weeks in 1975 with some 15,000 people at the start. In 1989, the project was finally abandoned after twenty years of planning that cost 1.3 billion Swiss francs in the end. As the controversy was at its peak, the photographs often showed the same thing over and over: demonstrators, protest signs, raised fists, and cooling towers, alone or with cows grazing in the foreground. Hans Danuser adopted a different approach. He worked hard, he fought adamantly for the right to take close up pictures on location in the heart of nuclear energy research and production, of nuclear reactors, nuclear reactor research, and interim storage of nuclear waste. Through his own efforts he succeeded in reclaiming, at least partially, sovereignty of visual interpretation, which in this case Motor-Columbus, as the company that was to potentially run the nuclear reactor, held the exclusive rights. He distanced his photographs from the others in two ways: Firstly he fragmented the symbol of the cooling tower into three parts. And, secondly, he presented the nuclear reactor and the places where nuclear research was being carried out devoid of people. We experience these places in his photographs as empty, tightly regulated rooms, with many signs and signals. We enter them as if we were on our way to our workplace, we are led through them, to the changing room, the double-door systems, the fog in the cooling tower. We look into the nuclear reactor, follow the nuclear waste to its interim storage place—metal containers stapled one over the other with labels and simply covered with plastic. Perhaps we can still remember that in the 1970s Switzerland dumped its nuclear waste in the Mediterranean Sea offshore from Portugal. We speak of a “permanent disposal site,” but suspect or know that there is no such thing as a permanent disposal site for nuclear waste, because it must be permanently monitored and safe-kept under the strictest measures for the next 50,000 years.

Danuser’s very first photographs are very different to the press photography that was common at the time, which was inevitably descriptive and documentary by nature. He avoids using ideological symbols and references and, instead of using the camera to emphatically present descriptive facts, provides room for beholders to immerse themselves in his photographs. They engulf their beholders, allow them to scout around; make them view in a way that triggers emotions, leaving latitude to the sensations of taste and smell, paradoxically addressing several senses concurrently. The very first picture of the project, taken in the collection basin of the cooling tower, brings to mind Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, a kind of apocalyptic vision, a visual Sodom and Gomorrah.

In his second project, the Gold series, “photographed in a gold foundry, a gold refinery and bank vaults,” a deep, light-absorbing black predominates in the photographs, which is interrupted by the glowing, blazing light produced by melting down and then pouring the glowing molten gold into the ingot casts. The effect is that of dramatic, industrial chiaroscuro, as we know in painting since Caravaggio, with an inner light source and not shining in from some outer source, where the lighting is purely and simply the product of a process captured on film. In the prints and the reproductions, the saturation and darkness of the black values are between eighty to one hundred percent, and the brightness is equally extreme, which now and again appears as if Danuser had scratched away the gelatin silver layer on the paper substrate. The impression of alchemy coincides with the mute and brilliant transformation of raw gold into its pure form, from one of the earth's elements into an abstract dimension, into the world of monetary abstractions, values, and capital.

In Medicine I the white of the tiles predominates. The rooms “photographed in anatomy and pathology instruction and research laboratories” are all tiled. It is a cold white, washed out in parts and bleached from much cleaning, into which human corpses and limbs are brought for dissection. Heads, brains, hearts, stomachs, organs. Here photography revitalizes anatomy as the classical interface between science and art. We follow the investigative, dissecting gaze, look on as the skin is removed, as the corpses and limbs are fragmented in the search of knowledge, of certainty. Danuser here again, as in the A-Energy series, maintains a remarkable balance between events and place of occurrence. The photographs give the environment, the space, the site, the condition of the floors, and metal dissecting tables the status of fellow actors. They are as eloquent as what we can perceive in them, they create the ambience, pictorial space, visual atmosphere. They are the covers of a book, paper, and text in one. United, their gentle muttering is the accompaniment for the visual words spelled in capitals “Energy!, “Gold!,” “Values!,” “Existence!,” “Knowledge!” The intensity of the images and the subject matter demands the use of exclamation marks.

Just as in the nuclear energy series, this series begins with a photograph of skins, of protective clothing. Emptied, washed, hanging on hooks, they reference the activities of people while refusing to show them in action, actively engaging with their work. People are present in each and every picture, with their knowledge, their volition, their power, their goals, wishes, perhaps even their neuroses, while at the same time they disappear behind their machines and technology, in their rooms and spaces, in the world they have created. However, in Medicine II, “photographed in ophthalmology and otorhinolarynology clinics and research laboratories,” humanity is present as the subject of investigation in a special way during operations on eyes, noses, ears, the human senses, the instruments of humankind with which bodies are in touch with the world. We know how manipulate them so we have longer use of them, so they offer heightened precision, to enhance their performance. And the voice issuing from the larynx, the organ with which we breathe and speak, is our means of keeping in touch and communicating with the rest of the world. It is the powerhouse of our existence and social life. The organs that are to be operated on are laid bare for the purpose and the rest covered up, wiped away, wiped out with disinfection. Here medicine superbly mirrors humanity's capacity to act. We are excellent mechanics. We can repair precisely and accurately, but still do not understand much of the greater context. Within the scope of the latter, in its complex, interdependent, multilayered connections we are, above all, almost incapable of acting. Tubes and wires connect the patient to machines. The “cases” humbly submit to the world of substitutes, which, for the time of the operation, monitor the patients’ condition, breathing, and circulation—or do for them. The early stages of the cyborization of humanity, the union of nature and the prosthesis, the original replaced by a substitute or enhanced by artificial means and support. We penetrate through the outer layer, the outward appearance of things, into the body, into its machinery. Monitoring a patient undergoing endoscopy on a screen means to look into the innermost recesses of the body, docking the body onto the big machine. This is a totally new form of being humbled, an encroachment on the physical integrity or the intimacy of the body, a new kind of power that makes a necessity of an individual body submitting to the power and potency of organized knowledge.

Los Alamos, the fourth series, “photographed in laboratories for nuclear fusion and laser research,” is essentially architectural scenes. On the one hand, the series strives to apprehend the space around the earth as a real and an imaginary architectural structure, a network of laser canons. They have everything under control, always and everywhere. On the other, Hans Danuser took photos in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the United States government under Ronald Reagan was developing laser technology, still very new and uncharted territory at the time. We see dark rooms, workplaces that “speak” of cold brilliance when light hits metal, of fast-paced and intensive research, of a military bunker, disrupted by sharp beams of light, warning signs, and a robot-like laser canon, a metal octopus with an orb that can shoot in all directions, that is, 360 x 360 degrees. The project was ultimately discarded, shelved for the meantime—at least nothing new has been reported since. At the time, however, it was touted as the weapon that would give the United States the lead in the Cold War, turning the tide in the quest for global dominance. This was the reason why Hans Danuser decided to give up his first military project, which involved photographs of the anti-aircraft development company named Contraves in Switzerland, among others, and began with the Los Alamos project.

As stated above, in the series on the whole, it is largely the photographs of the surroundings that determine the overall picture. They are the photographs that frame, shape the spatial context in which the pictures unfold the subject matter—resembling crime-scene photographs, providing a survey of the situation, defining the location of the motifs and theme. They are remarkably compelling in the Los Alamos series. In Chemistry I, “photographed in pharmacology and chemistry research laboratories, analysis and production,” such pictures convey an atmosphere that is cramped, claustrophobic, even suffocating. Together, pictures 2 and 3 of this series are reminiscent of Alcatraz or Guantánamo, like a hopeless prison for animals, for the rats bred “for the benefit of humanity," for research and analyses, often simply receiving injections of substances until pathological symptoms begin to show, until they develop behavioral disorders, until cancer manifests. To give the beholder the same feeling of hopelessness, Hans Danuser turned one of the photographs so that the two images interlock in a way that optically bars the way, terminating it, to become a dead end. There is a marked contrast between the physically palpable dark and gloomy barred-in spaces and the brilliant white of the writing boards, on which scientific formulas, production formulas (not yet profit estimations) have been scribbled, jotted down, for us an incoherent sketch. They are the flashes of inspiration, the formalization of the investigated material, abstractions of the flesh, the physical, are the precipitate of staged “natural” accidents. On the boards is the wording “brain sections in vitro test arrangement,” “open brain in vivo test arrangement.” The first image, the Magnetic Resonance Scan, appears to stage nature visually in terms of abstraction and geometry through science. This examination of a rat, at the time only carried out annually, experiences a geometrical transformation in the image, it has become an abstract entity explained in terms of squares, triangles, and circles. Every series contains several key images. However, if you want to pick out just one of these photographs, it is almost the only one that can stand for the whole, for the project, the thoughts, its hidden values.

With only one exception, all the subjects Hans Danuser tackled were controversial, intensively debated, and sometimes excited protest. But he only first stumbled on the topic of genetic research in the last chapter of In vivo, while taking the photographs for the series, in the process of realizing the project. The Chemistry 2 series, “photographed in life science laboratories and in pharmacology and agronomy genetic engineering and biotechnology laboratories,” marks the conclusion of his large project. One of its photographs, an ultrasound image of an embryo, is the very first picture that refers beyond the directly visible world. It is the visual expression of a technology that goes deep below the surface, a technology that can manipulate the very roots of our world, that is, the genes. Danuser shows us the very first tobacco plant that was genetically modified. He visualized analog DNA-RNA determination. This series makes especially the great differences in temperature visible, from the minus 197 degrees of the ice where genetic material is stored to 37 degrees in a kind of “life” incubator. The individual photographs in this series are named Tobacco Plant, Container, Embryo, Incubator, Deoxyribonucleic Acid/DNA, Ice, Ice, Ice, Glass Ampoules, Ultrasound Image, Ice. The “ice” proved prescient for the following project, the Frozen Embryo Series.

The first picture in the series and the book and the last resemble one another like brother and sister. Fog determines the visual atmosphere in both of them, both formulate the transition from simple visibility—“in front of us stands a house on level ground”—to complex perceptions of reality and interventions in it: “What has been dribbled onto film here visualizes the inner structure of life, it visualizes DNA.”

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At the start I wrote that Hans Danuser’s photographs were very different to the reportage, documentary photography typical for the time. This holds true for both the subject matter and the visual vocabulary. Danuser’s domain are socially relevant areas, such as research and energy production, finance, knowledge, control, power, and violence. They are taboo areas, where access is controlled or blocked and communication channeled. As a rule, information in general and sovereignty of interpretation both over research results and the visual language illustrating these increasingly abstract issues lies in the hands of companies and institutions, and they guard it like the Holy Grail. Danuser’s patience, his insistence and persistence, the way he hones and breaks this pictorial project down into something artistic, deliberating, and complex, opened doors for him, doors that are impassable now.

Hans Danuser’s visual vocabulary was, at the time, new, different, and nevertheless highly photographic. In the first one hundred or so years in the history of this medium, motifs so engrossed our vision, held us spellbound to such a degree, that, hungry for visual sustenance, gazing in hope of visual insight, we for the most part could not see beyond this. Tunnel vision focusing on optics was the generally accepted mode. Although the views and insights of this kind of photography improved from decade to decade, the photographers who mastered the rules of the game for photography and the square frame with ever greater virtuosity, gradually came to realize how strongly the photographic image depended on technological innovations in cameras, optics, in films and photographic paper. Filled with curiosity and their passion and partiality for motifs, together with their enthusiasm and a sense for business, they scarcely looked to the left or the right, above or below, to the edge of the frame and beyond. They never turned around and asked who was taking the pictures and under what sociopolitical, economic, and media-specific conditions.

Only Japanese photography around 1970 adopted a different approach of “are, buke, boke” in Provoke magazine and in the pictures of the Provoke era photographers such as Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, and Daidō Moriyama, to name a few. “Are, buke, boke” means grainy, blurry, and out of focus. The effect of their photographs makes it clear that they are not attempting to be “beautiful, attractive pictures” or “committed, coherent photographs,” that they are not attempting to capture things with utmost documentary precision. Instead they strive to show that photographers were on the move, that photography was the confrontation between life in motion and the photographer in motion. Thus the picture was more or less the precipitate of this encounter, the result of slowly sweeping past one another or sudden collision. If you leaf through the only three issues that were ever published of Provoke magazine, they excite the impression that “something” is being broken open; that something is perhaps life, the situation, the location, the picture itself has become unhinged for the first time, that black-and-white are sometimes an aggressive means of attacking the classical world of representation and of sweeping it away. In these pictures we can discern a certain affinity to Hans Danuser’s approach.

Hans Danuser's ninety-three photographs for In Vivo seek to take the best of what photography has to offer and at the same time reinvent it anew. His modus operandi was explicitly photographic, with him traveling to many different places for the seven themes of his series and taking his pictures there. In these areas he was painstaking and moved about slowly and deliberately, and brought the films home afterwards to his own darkroom. This is the classical strategy of the photographer and at the same time a characteristic only the medium of photography allows. He developed and enlarged the photographs in a way so that the black edges of the negatives are visible, that at a push the edge can serve as the “evidence” that Danuser “really had been there.” However, the edges don’t appear in the finished work, neither in the book nor in the exhibitions. He always covers them up or cuts them off for the lithographic print. After all, he wanted to get away from photography as documentary survey and proof of the situation at a specific location and specific time. He wanted to pursue a different path, to do something new. He wanted to find a photographic image that shows the fundamentals, that records structures, that strives to comprehend abstract knowledge in pictures. He wanted to find visual forms that represent the essential characteristics of human behavior, of research, investigation, development, and production of the 1980s, visual forms in which both information and emotion have their place, as do also objective facts and connotations, description and visual imagery, crispness and fuzziness. Indeed, his photographs have a fuzzy appearance, like velvet, giving you the feeling you want to touch them because of their wealth of tonalities, because of the extreme richness and density of their silver content. Information is submerged in black tones or pales in the brightness of white and nevertheless persists, it is there, gives food for thought and emotions. Danuser persisted in a photographic way of proceeding, but sought to produce pictures that bring photography a step further, away from its motif orientation. He did not want to be confined by the tenet of evidential proof while at the same time not wishing to become one of the fine art photographers who were flourishing at the time. He continued working with the classical format of photography and did not bend to the rage of ever-larger formats in painting and photography, in billboards, in recent large-format painting, large-format photography. Instead he explored a third avenue leading between the existing categories and chronicled the world with the photographic visual imagery of a painter, a filmmaker, an Andrei Tarkovsky or a Fritz Lang.

Neither the themes nor the images have outlived their relevance over the past thirty years, and if they belong to another time, they are still meaningful today. Consequently this body of work is addressed again and again, even internationally. Genetic research has progressed a great deal since, Star Wars been discontinued, but the principles of knowledge and power, power and violence remain, and Danuser’s visual vocabulary befits all those in the present who probe in depth the images and themes of the profoundly real. However, the overlap between the book and the exhibition and the way in which the visual themes in their various forms are developed analogously (almost like in music) remain unique. Danuser later braved the plunge into the monumental, into the physical confrontation with the image, as in we can see in his square, four-by-four meter large photographs of Strangled Bodies with iron frames from the mid-1990s, to name just one example. This direction also lent his work a distinct installation quality.