Jules Spinatsch is a troubled photographer searching for truths

Jules Spinatsch’s photography does not offer easy reassurance. It confronts viewers with questions about images and with a persistent search for truths, often by arranging situations that make the act of looking impossible to ignore.

The Musée d’art des Grisons in Chur is now showing the largest panorama of his work that the artist has presented so far. Yet the exhibition is described as only a doorway into a much deeper body of work, one rooted in the questions of the present.

Its title brings together Spinatsch’s name and two years: 1964, the year he was born in Davos, and 2155, when Switzerland’s first nuclear-waste repository, near Zurich, is expected to be full. The date gives the exhibition a long horizon, stretching from the photographer’s lifetime toward a future shaped by the consequences of nuclear waste.

A few days after the site was announced in mid-September 2022, Spinatsch began an intergenerational project there called Infinity Obsoleum. Every year around the same date, he organizes a hike at the site. The walk feeds an expanding photographic series accompanied by documents and various actions. Through this continuing work, photography becomes not only a record but also a way of questioning how images are made, preserved and used to approach difficult truths.