For their tenth issue, Photo London presents the work of VII’s Daniel Schwartz. The featured photographs bear witness to his work on the climate crisis, begun in Asia in the early 1990s.
From the issue’s introduction:
Upon publication in 1997, Delta. The Perils, Profits and Politics of Water in South and Southeast Asia was reviewed as “A visual ‘j’accuse'” by the Financial Times.
After having covered the war in Afghanistan for twenty years, and in the context of his seminal work on Central Asia and the adjoining regions (Travelling through the Eye of History, 2009) Schwartz embarked on a journey leading from the relics of Holocene glaciation in Switzerland into the milieu of the Anthropocene, to collapsing glaciers on three continents.
While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey (2017) is both a photographic inquiry and awareness project.
Glaciers are portrayed as a gauge of anthropogenic global warming and fast disappearing archive of climatic and cultural history, as glacio-archaeological find spot and place of remembrance and metaphor of memory. The outcome, a “glaciology in pictures,” as it were, is the result of a synthesis of scientific observation and artistic action. The environmental context makes this work a counterpart and continuation of the earlier book Delta, which is an example of the author’s photojournalistic approach.