Beryl Chen: A Jamaican Girl

Beryl Chen: A Jamaican Girl gathers Rene Groebli's portrait studies of a young woman, printed from negatives that sat in the Swiss photographer's archive for decades before this book brought them into view.

The pictures hold the same close, attentive quality found throughout Groebli's early work: patient studio and location portraiture built on trust between photographer and sitter rather than on staging. The book accompanies the images with text by Teo Schlachter and was issued as a slim 44-page hardcover by Sturm & Drang Publishers in Zurich in 2015, one of several volumes through which the press has been re-surfacing corners of Groebli's archive that were never published in his lifetime.

Groebli, born in 1927, established his reputation with Rail Magic (1949) and the frankly intimate honeymoon diary The Eye of Love (1954), photobooks now regarded as landmarks of postwar European photography. Sturm & Drang's subsequent volumes, including Early Work 1945-1955 and New York 1978, have restored attention to a career that also spanned commercial, industrial and colour photography in Zurich.