Embracing the motto “You can do anything but bore people,” the legendary Swiss tabloid BLICK first appeared on newsstands on 14 October 1959. From the very beginning, BLICK was close to the action and spoke to its readers at eye level—quite the opposite to other newspapers of the time. Born in two small flats on the edges of Zurich’s banking district, BLICK has since flourished and polarized the public throughout its history: it’s been publically burnt, one of its journalists was arrested at gunpoint, and the Swiss Federal Council even boycotted it. Yet one thing is certain, the newspaper sells: by the mid-eighties its circulation had reached a record 384,000.

Photography has always had a special place in BLICK; a newspaper with so many images (black-and-white until the mid-eighties) had simply not existed before. BLICK proudly puts photography on center stage and unconventionally combines it with text to tell stories in radically different ways: the first photo taken from the moon graced a double page, a photographer rode backwards on a motorbike to catch the dynamism of the Tour de Suisse… To celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of BLICK this book collects the strongest, most original and emotional photos from the hundreds of thousands in its archives, and presents them to the wider international public for the first time.

Co-published with Ringier, Zurich