Welcome to the official website of Swiss artist and photographer Daniel Schwartz.
The four PRACTICE sections – Books, Projects, Assignments, En Route – present what I do and will be gradually expanded to include both current projects and work from the archive. Each entry comes with a selection of photographs. Together with the words they articulate my concern for the human predicament in what seems to be an increasingly fractured world.
The photographs do not seek to explain the world, still less to imprint my views on it; they serve more as tools in my quest for the meaning of its bearings. One synthesis the photographs could express is that the way things are is not the way they have to be.
My methods are story-telling – the oldest cultural practice of them all – and, as things evolve in the course of my work, history-telling. I accord primacy to my objects; consequently I impose no limits on the possibilities of the medium.
My art is documentary. It is in the history of places and in the long perspective, which humans divide into periods in order to obtain some semblance of control over the time in which they act. Within it is the future.
My journalism is not a reaction to events. Being itself active and a commitment defined by observations that seek to localize and to follow ecological and political developments and their social and cultural consequences over many years and over large geographical expanses, my journalism builds on memory.