In 1991, while researching his feature film *Wachtmeister Zumbühl*, the Swiss director Urs Odermatt came across a cache of images made by his father, Arnold, a policeman in the central Swiss canton of Nidwalden. Arnold Odermatt had spent five decades photographing traffic accidents, police work, family life, and the ordinary rhythms of postwar Switzerland, working as a self-taught photographer with a medium-format camera and an unwavering standard. Asked what made a good picture, he answered simply that it must be sharp—a remark that gives this book its title and its guiding principle.

The photographs themselves are composed with a dry, faintly ironic documentary precision. Their most disarming quality is the way scenes of collision and aftermath settle into the unhurried, idyllic landscape of a remote canton: a wrecked car at the edge of a quiet road, an accident site absorbed into the surrounding calm. Over five decades Odermatt built a visual world that belongs to him alone, and it is this world that the book’s texts—by Daniel Blochwitz, Matthias Dell, and Harald Szeemann—examine and interpret.

Edited by Markus Hartmann, this is the first publication to offer a longer biographical treatment of Odermatt’s life and work. Its ninety-six pages carry eighty illustrations, and the book also recounts in detail the unlikely discovery, cataloguing, and circulation of the photographs through exhibitions, media, galleries, and books. Urs Odermatt’s role in bringing his father’s archive to public attention is part of that story, which doubles as a compact account of the art world’s past quarter century.

Published by Hartmann Books in 2017, the volume measures roughly 16.5 by 24 centimeters and appears in a German-language hardcover edition. It gives Odermatt’s idiosyncratic documentary practice the sustained critical attention it had previously lacked, gathering biographical narrative, interpretive essays, and a substantial body of images in a single book.