american conservatory theaterexhibits@ACTHANS MAULI, PHOTOGRAPHER
Born in Aarau, Switzerland in 1937, Hans Mauli studied art at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. He became a graphic designer and worked in Aarau, Copenhagen, London, Paris and New York. In the late sixties he worked for the celebrated Herb Lubalin in New York and for the advertising agency Young & Rubicam in Paris. Though graphic design was his profession, he had always wanted to be a photographer.
Hans's first camera was a Rolleiflex, and his earliest photos were taken in the public places of Swiss cities and towns, in Copenhagen, London and Paris. At the time, from 1959 to the early sixties, he didn't have access to a darkroom and therefore never made any prints of his pictures until much later.
In 1971 Hans made the professional switch to photography and established himself in Paris as a successful advertising photographer for the next 20 years. He worked for major agencies including Young and Rubicam, J. Walter Thompson, McCann Erickson, Publicis, Doyle Dane Bernbach and TBWA, and did extensive campaigns for Sony.
In 1991 he moved with his American wife and their French-born daughter to the United States. He lived on the East Coast and traveled extensively throughout the country for a year taking lots of pictures. During his travels he was seduced by the beauty of the Bay Area and moved here in 1992.
Since moving to this country he has turned to fine art photography. He rediscovered his old negatives and contact sheets and made the first prints of his early work in the 1990s. Some of the negatives had been lost, but he was able to digitally recreate them from scans of the contact sheets.
Hans's fine art prints were exhibited by the Mill Valley Art Commission in 1995 and 1996, he participated in the Hotel Triton Contemporary Art Fair in San Francisco in 1996, and he frequently exhibits his work in Bay Area restaurants and other commercial establishments. One of his prints, Window Dressing, Copenhagen 1960, was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1997.
Fine black and white photos of people and places remain his specialty, with emphasis on technical mastery, capturing special moments of movement or expression, and unique, transitory conditions of atmosphere and light.