Les glaciers des Alpes et la photographie. Dans la lumière de leur disparition (The glaciers of the Alps and photography. In the light of their disappearance)

Born in the middle of the 19th century, photography glorified the magnificence of Alpine glaciers in their greatest recent extension. Photographers invented the glacial landscape, inscribing an unforgettable image of the mountain into modernity. Both documents and testimonies, capable of transmitting knowledge and sharing emotions, the first photographs of glaciers have carried an overwhelming aesthetic force to our present.

Building an arch between these ancient images and those that photographers take today, in the age of the Anthropocene when glaciers are disappearing, Claude Reichler shows how contemporary visual artists work on the trace nature that is the photographic image. They inscribe their subjectivity and create a new aesthetic, inspired by disappearance and memory. Glaciers are seen as suffering beings, as if their planned death made them alive. Considered yesterday as the expression of elementary forces, of a first world, have they not become symbols of the end of a world? Through the superb images it contains and the literary essay it constitutes, this book allows us to see and think about the hesitation between sustainability, passage and vulnerability.

Publication’s content:
Magnificence (1845 – 1865)
Convergences
Drawing and photography
The glacial landscape
Photography in the service of science
Mountain landscape and photography
II. Distress. Contemporary artistic photographs
The Disfigured Mountain (Walter Niedermayr)
Danger Spotters (Georg Aerni, Nicolas Crispini)
Returning to the sources of landscape (Mathieu Gafsou)
Impassive images (Aurore Bagarry)
Sheets (tarpaulins) on glaciers (Laurence Piaget‐Dubuis, Ester Vonplon)
Scratch the image, get out of the frame (Jacques Pugin)
Aletsch in the feminine (Laurence Bonvin)
Monuments (Douglas Mandry)
Effigies (Olivier de Sépibus, Thomas Bouvier)

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Claude Reichler (1946) is a Swiss author, professor emeritus at the University of Lausanne and guest professor in several countries. After devoting himself to literary criticism in the movement of overcoming poststructuralism, he now researches, from a perspective of history of culture, on the theory and the history of the landscape.