All Roads Lead to Switzerland

Why it works

The Swiss National Tourist Office's first poster for motor touring, and a landmark in putting the camera to work for advertising. Herbert Matter, back from Paris where he had assisted Cassandre and Le Corbusier, spliced existing tourist photographs into what reads as one seamless view: a road surface sweeps away from the viewer and up a chain of hairpin bends towards snowy summits. The red headline runs across the pale wedge of road, which let the office reissue the image in several languages. It is studied because Matter's Swiss series was among the first travel posters built from purely photographic imagery, using cropping, montage and dramatic shifts of scale and perspective. MoMA says these posters "revolutionized both the medium and the genre"; its French-language copy came from the typographer Jan Tschichold's collection. In New York, the art director Alexey Brodovitch had two of Matter's travel posters on his studio wall, and Matter was soon shooting for Harper's Bazaar.