Arnold Odermatt: the Swiss policeman who did a crash course in photography

Is it art? This Swiss policeman’s life’s work has divided the art community for years as it tours the world to great acclaim.

Arnold Odermatt was a Swiss police photographer whose work spanned more than 40 years. Originally trained as a baker, he was a photographer for the Nidwalden cantonal police from 1948 until his retirement in 1990. Odermatt passed away on June 19, 2021.

The cold reason of pompous arts scholarship would have dismissed Arnold Odermatt’s meticulous and precise photography as nothing more than police records, even though photography had been considered an art form since not long after Odermatt won a camera as a 10-year-old.

He was born in the alpine forests of the little canton of Nidwalden where he started out as a baker, but he battled with an allergy to wheat or yeast and instead became a policeman. That was in 1948 and he remained in the job until retiring in 1990, never leaving the district. But since winning the twin-lens Rolleiflex as a child he had become absorbed by photography, learning about light and shutter speeds and, as a traffic policeman, started photographing accident sites.

He would do these in two sessions: one for the police records – often graphic images of death and trauma – and later he would capture just the empty cars in unpeopled scenes. Why he did this was never explained.

Arnold Odermatt.

Until Odermatt, police sketched accident scenes in their notebooks. He changed car accident investigation, which is now almost its own science.

Having dropped the idea of “pastoralising” the Allied-occupied Germany in the wake of World War II, Britain oversaw the revival of Volkswagen’s Wolfsburg factory so that by 1948 a total of 19,244 cars rolled off its production line. A disproportionate number of these seem to have found their way to the then isolated Nidwalden and come to grief on its challenging, often snowbound roads – upside down, wrapped around lampposts, or in the many local lakes – and Odermatt photographed them all. He kept them – each carefully indexed – in their many thousands in his attic.

Originally, some of Odermatt’s colleagues were suspicious of the camera-wielding officer and he was summoned to explain himself. But he won approval and, slowly, he came by better facilities and darkrooms in which to bring to life what had often been scenes of death shortly before. He bought a tripod and then a VW bus so he could be elevated above the scene. Finally a magnesium flash allowed him to turn night into day if just for a few seconds. But he still used the 1935 Rolleiflex he’d won as a boy.

Odermatt originally trained as a baker.

In 1990, the year he retired, Odermatt’s director son Urs chanced upon the images while researching a film. He encouraged his father to exhibit some of them and a collection was shown at Frankfurt’s police headquarters during that city’s book fair. They were seen by the director of the Venice Biennial, which featured the collection in 2002.

Urs collated the car accident photographs into a book published as Karambolage (which translates as “collision” or “smash-up”). By now the photographs were internationally acclaimed, even if debate still divides audiences and experts about whether the humble, detached images – each an anonymous, self-contained drama – represent art. Certainly, the elder Odermatt never saw them as that. “A good photo is in focus, you have to be able to see everything that you want,” he would say. And we can. With unchallenged clarity.

So is it art? Former picture editor of The Australian Bill McAuley thinks so: “Odermatt’s images of car accidents display artistry in his technique, and his understanding of strong composition is evident – good art can make sense out of chaos.”

McAuley believes the photographs have emotional power and distil the poignancy of a situation. “They make us stop, think and feel. Therefore, they are art.”