While on assignment in 1952 in a war-torn village in Korea, Swiss photographer Werner Bischof snapped a cluster of press photographers, cameras pointed like guns. Bischof titled the piece Vultures of the Battlefield, an allusion to the constant struggle that he himself faced during his brief but impressive career: capturing the true human story versus producing sensationalistic images of suffering.

Highly influenced by American photographer Man Ray, Bischof's early work shows a great sensitivity toward his subjects and an urge to unveil truth rather than manipulate it, foreshadowing the artist's later focus on human issues. One early photograph titled Vine makes even that vegetal subject appear almost animate by using an extreme close-up angle and soft lighting. The intimate style exhibited in this work would later mature into an ability to portray human struggles and emotions and amplify them to universal truths.

Bischof's beginnings in a Zurich portrait studio enabled him to hone his craft and master light and shadow. Though he achieved success and won awards for his early work, Bischof soon tired of the frivolity of the studio, saying to his father in 1948, "I have burst out of this corset of self-satisfaction and now belong to the people."

To Bischof, this sense of "belonging to the people" originated with a bicycle tour of postwar southern Germany and later tours by car of Western, Eastern and northern Europe. The work he did in this period, including assignments for Life and the Zurich-based magazine Du, made him one of the best-known photographers in Europe and led to an invitation to join the prestigious press photographer's group Magnum, where he worked with greats such as Robert Capa and Ernst Haas.

Assignments took Bischof to Korea, Japan, South America, Indochina and India, with a series from the latter bringing him international recognition. In 1951 and 1952, thousands of people in India's state of Bihar were starving to death and no one seemed to be paying attention. Bischof's work shows a humanistic concern for the people as well as a masterfully artistic style, setting his work apart from that of other press photographers of the time. The pictures use the subject to frame and fill the entire shot, making the images more intimate as well as more terrifying, as they give the viewer's eyes no place to hide. Especially haunting are Old Woman With Stick and Master, We Are Dying, in which several emaciated women beg at a car window; the shot is taken from inside the car, allowing us a head-on view.

The India series also shows Bischof's tendency to create echoes between the background and foreground of the shots. For example, the bony limbs of peasants are repeated in the branches of a tree behind them. This unity in his work creates a singular focus, commanding the viewer's full attention.

The intimacy of Bischof's work is astounding not only because of the confidence his subjects obviously placed in him, but also because the scenes seem to be captured by the eye of someone going through the experience himself. The photo titled Women Praying for Their Men at War is an exquisitely framed bird's-eye view of two women folded over mats in prayer. One can almost feel the silence in the room, and it is remarkable that an outsider in so many ways — a man, a foreigner, a member of the press — could have been there without disrupting them.

This desire to portray the closest truth and reality of each situation, no matter how small, is perhaps what led Bischof away from his first love of painting and toward photography. His work, especially his later photographs, shows evidence that he retained a painter's eye. Images from his posthumously published book Japan, such as Silk Drying and Shinto Priests in the Court of the Meji Temple seem at first glance to be enhanced with paint, if not actually paintings.

Bischof's desire to tell the entire story makes it no surprise that shortly before his death in 1954 he purchased a motion-picture camera. Indeed, even pictures from his early studio work — such as Steelworker — resemble close-up movie stills, showing each bead of sweat and even a twinkle in the worker's eye. And in a postwar shot of the Swiss border, he wrote text on top of the print, presumably in order to enlighten the viewer about the sounds and smells as well as the sights and emotions of the event.