Peter Knapp

Peter Knapp studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich, then directed by Johannes Itten. Afterwards he came to Paris and became art director of Galeries Lafayette in 1955. He worked in Brussels on the World Fair Tobacco Pavilion in 1956. In the sixties he became art director of ELLE magazine and started at the same time to photograph the fashion for different magazines in Europe. Using this fashion experience, Knapp worked for French TV in Paris and directed over 20 episodes of Dim Dam Dom, a series of short TV films on fashion and beauty that became an art-scene cult.

After the seventies he stopped his fashion work and became a book and magazine designer, working for OMS in Geneva, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, and a long collaboration with Sauret Editions, Monaco, for whom he won two book prizes for Lumières de Chartres and Giacometti. Knapp has been teaching in the Académie Julian in Paris and at Hachette-Filipacci University for ten years. He still works as a photographer and film director, for example making half a dozen films for the AGI Congress in Paris on Henry Wolf, Troxler and Catherine Zask, and more.