The Hidden Mother is comprised of 1,002 photographs (from daguerreotypes and tintypes to cartes de visite and cabinet cards), all examples of a now redundant practice: to cloak or hide a parent within the background of a child’s portrait, a common procedure from the advent of photography up until the 1920s, when exposure times were relative slow, and a hidden …

In the mid-1970s, Robert Adams began recording nocturnal scenes near his former home in Longmont, Colorado. Illuminated by moonlight and streetlamp, suburban houses, roads, sidewalks and fields seemed transfigured. 25 years after first publishing a sequence of these pictures in 1985 as Summer Nights, he revisited his project, amending its title and completely re-editing its contents to create a …

We are participating in Swiss Photomonth, a new initiative by the association ‘Spectrum – Photography in Switzerland’. 

The first edition is from 30 August to 6 October 2024.

The Swiss Photomonth acts as a loudspeaker for the Swiss photography scene in its entirety, and aims to introduce an audience as wide as possible to the many venues, large and …

Visit the Exhibitions section or our Vimeo page

We offer you the last four exhibitions but we are working on documenting the previous ones as well.

Scenescape is the twenty-third exhibition organized by the Rolla Foundation. Philip Rolla's introductory text explains the proposed theme: "By chance or by choice everything we see becomes a scene to our vision. This may be simple, almost nothing, complex, sophisticated or banal, but is a scene, maybe just for an instant, maybe over an elapsed time span and it …

Between two worlds. Story of Philip Rolla
by Maria Grazia Rabiolo

When Philip Rolla left California after graduating from university, the trip he took was diametrically opposite to that of his grandparents, who had arrived in California in the early twentieth century from Piedmont. His professional adventure began in Turin and continued in Italian-speaking Switzerland. A craftsman-engineer, he is the …

New SPECTRUM portal to find museums, galleries, collections, archives, libraries, festivals, schools in Switzerland.


Spectrum - Photography in Switzerland was established in 2017 as a successor to ASIP (ASIP - Association Suisse des institutions pour la photographie was founded in 1996 as an association of Swiss photographic institutions).

Spectrum - Photography in Switzerland now welcomes not only photo institutions, collective …

The sections dedicated to the Rolla Collection and the Library were created thanks to the support of the Republic and Canton of Ticino - DECS and the federal government as part of the COVID support measures for the cultural sector.