The national scout camp taking place in Goms in the summer of 2022 offers a unique opportunity to present a previously unpublished collection of historical photographs of the international girls' scout camp in Goms in the summer of 1957. The 1957 Goms Camp was an international jubilee camp that took place in ten villages of the Goms with more than 6000 participating Girl Guides and Girl Scouts. The Girl Scouts were able to attend workshops and courses of various kinds. Henri Mutter, a teacher from Niederwald, and Hans Eggermann, an apprentice photographer from Lucerne, led a photography course and at the same time captured the scout camp in numerous high-quality black-and-white photographs. Their photographs document not only a major event of the scout movement, but also the landscape, the villages and the people of the 1950s in Goms. They take the photography of a Werner Bischof as their model and reflect the cosmopolitan spirit of optimism of the post-war period.
The exhibition is scheduled to be on view from 21 May 2022 until spring 2023. It will be curated by Board member and art historian Benno Mutter and by Andreas Hertach, freelance exhibition curator from Lucerne.
On display will be around thirty photographs in classic black-and-white enlargements, divided into the thematic groups of railway station scenes, encounters in the village, the flag procession on the village square, camp life, studios and photo course (cf. photo selection and sketch in the appendix). In addition, a short film shot in 1957 offers an insight into camp life, and original apparatus and instruments from the 1950s illustrate photography at the time and the work in the analogue black-and-white laboratory.