Daniel Schwartz on Kulturplatz

The Southern Peaks of Mt. Stanley, Rwenzori Mountains, Uganda, on 14 November 2015. Elena Glacier, Stanley Plateau and Margherita Glacier are seen from across Semper Peak of Mt. Baker which has lost almost all of its glaciers. Equatorial glaciers are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change and those in Uganda are expected to disappear within a few decades. To the ancient Greeks and Romans the Rwenzori glaciers were know as the sources of the Nile, but their geographic location was disputed and remained a mystery until modern times.

Daniel Schwartz appeared on SRF Swiss Public TV’s culture program Kulturplatz on January 9, 2019.

The alarming findings of climate change research hardly reach the general public and it takes art to get the message out. In this respect, the photography of Daniel Schwartz has major implications. His work on global warming dates back to the 1990s when he documented life and death in the river deltas in Asia. His project While the Fires Burn, A Glacier Odyssey, documents global glacier collapse. A glaciology in images, his black & white photographs are the result of an intense dialogue with science. In the present, they contribute to the awareness of the issue, in the future, they will be of relevance for the understanding of climate history. Schwartz’s exhibition in the Grisons Museum of Art, Chur, Switzerland, is juxtaposed with Sebastiao Salgados’ Genesis exhibition in Zurich, and the latter’s digital enhancement to Schwartz’s purist analog method.

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