What the photographer Daniel Schwartz (*1955) has been concentrating on for many years could be called glaciology in images. His artistic work is a multidisciplinary project of photographic art in documentary style. As a photographer Daniel Schwartz examines the visual power of glaciers. He substantiates his pictorial work by extensive artist’s research in archives, and works in close dialogue with science. His images show the glacier as a dynamic system and as an archive of climate history, as a personal place of remembrance and reservoir of resources, which are neither unlimited nor indefinitely available.

Daniel Schwartz attended the master class in photography in Zürich and from 1990 to 2005 was a member of the editorial team of the culture magazine “du”. In connection with his broad-based photographic research he travelled all over the world. The glacier-work is his first project relating to Switzerland. It starts in the Mittelland where glaciers have left their marks and at the Jura-Südfuss where Daniel Schwartz grew up. Via biographically connoted places and paths the project explores the Alpine region and is augmented by images of selected glacier areas in Asia, Africa and South America. Integrated the exhibition are examples of painting and cartography, which record the status of glaciers during the Little Ice Age and mark their shrinkage during the last 200 years. The context of climate history is provided by the incorporated historical and literary sources.

The richly illustrated and visually stunning exhibition is an awareness-project about the glacier as witness of man-made climate change. It highlights the relationship “glacier/man”; and for a better understanding of the processes of earth warming, it provides parallels between geological or rather glacial time-scale and individually perceptible human time-scale.