Beat Schlatter – Rock'n'Roll Hinterland: Swiss Backstages

All across Switzerland, in smaller towns like Schaffhausen or Biel, as well as in larger villages such as Altdorf or Buchs, there are spaces for performance: local public theaters, restaurants with a stage, or multi-purpose halls. For the past thirty years, actor-comedian and playwright Beat Schlatter has traveled Switzerland in every direction to perform his own programs and to appear in shows—which means that he has rested, changed, and done his makeup in the makeshift backstage areas of hundreds of these modest venues. When on tour, Schlatter takes photographs of these usually dull transitional spaces where minor celebrities and local stars and starlets await their appearances. This new book, featuring around three hundred of Schlatter’s images, is a testimonial to the these simultaneously generic and strangely idiosyncratic places, the moderate melancholy and the well- intentioned fruit bowl inherent to all of them, no matter how conventional or hilariously extravagant they may seem.