Karlheinz Weinberger #4: Rocker

Selected from a vast amount of negatives and slides in the archive of the Karlheinz Weinberger Foundation in Zürich, Rocker is the fourth volume in Sturm & Drang’s series of works on the Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger (1921–2006), a rediscovered artist best known for his outsider and homoerotic images.

Karlheinz Weinberger himself related to the teenagers and rockers of the 1960s and later decades and he went on to capture the scene, becoming its ‘court photographer’ of sorts to local biker gangs such as the Lone Stars who morphed into a chapter of the Hells Angels.

Where society only saw delinquency, he saw rebels without a cause, attracted to the beauty, pride and vulnerability he saw in these early rockers who tried to hide behind their ragged and patched uniforms and huge, macho belt buckles.

The eroticism that reverberates through all his work is noticeably on display here.

Weinberger’s work was really only discovered by the art scene shortly before his death. His archive revealed tens of thousands of prints, slides and negatives that have been collected, numbered, and indexed over the last decade.

Many never-before-seen images were discovered during this process and are published in Rocker for the first time.