«In the black-and-white photographs you can feel Balthasar Burkhard standing in front of his motif. His gaze through the camera weighs, structures and composes. […] A touch of melancholy is embodied in the colouring and scent of his heliogravures. One can almost hear the voices of the three sisters in Chekhov’s eponymous drama, first performed in 1901. The pictures are imbued with a breath of transience, even of resignation. But at the same time, the scent of desire, of wanting to blossom is a strong instinct.» (Jean-Christophe Ammann)
Two volumes show the artist’s late full-colour work and older black-and-white photographs that focus on the body and the landscape. Burkhard’s pictures of blossoms and plants are of such sensual intensity that we can almost smell their colours.

«In the black-and-white photographs you can feel Balthasar Burkhard standing in front of his motif. His gaze through the camera weighs, structures and composes. […] A touch of melancholy is embodied in the colouring and scent of his heliogravures. One can almost hear the voices of the three sisters in Chekhov’s eponymous drama, first performed in 1901 . The pictures are imbued with a breath of transience, even of resignation. But at the same time, the scent of desire, of wanting to blossom is a strong instinct.» (Jean-Christophe Ammann)

Two volumes show the artist’s late full-colour work and older black-and-white photographs that focus on the body and the landscape.

Burkhard’s pictures of blossoms and plants are of such sensual intensity that we can almost smell their colours.

Swiss photographer Balthasar Burkhard (born 1944) makes large-format pictures that bring out the general contours of a repertoire of subjects―primarily bodies and landscapes (both urban and rural)―which are presented in dramatically stark black-and-white contrast to create an effect of extreme formal reduction and breathtaking scale. In his well-known portraits of the Alps, for example, he elicits both delicate detail and epic monumentality from the mountainscape, projecting an atmosphere of forceful silence and enlarging the drama with painterly effects. For the viewer, Burkhard's images provoke a thrilling vertigo, as the eye roams to locate an anchor amid such vast scale. This beautiful two-volume set premiers Burkhard's new full-color work alongside the older black-and-white portrait and landscape photographs for which the artist is so well known. These recent color pictures of blossoms and plants convey an impressive sensual intensity, so palpable we can almost smell their scents.