The Bernese Leonardo Bezzola, a classic black-and-white photographer, has created an extensive body of work since the 1940s - cityscapes of Venice, shots of racing cars, portraits of artists and writers, and travel reports. Bezzola is not a frantic reporter but an extremely precise, patient, and sensitive observer, an essayist with the camera. "He finds the images before he operates the camera, not later with a magnifying glass in the contact sheet, let alone on the laptop" (André Kamber). Bezzola came to photography as a self-taught artist and also made a name for himself as a graphic designer and filmmaker, which led him to the central theme of his photographic work: the comprehensive artist portraits he created of figures such as Jean Tinguely, Bernhard Luginbühl, or Raffael Benazzi. He also collaborated repeatedly with Peter Bichsel and produced a film in 1976.