News
Publication announcement
«Unterwegs zu den Gletschern der Welt»
Verlag Galiani Berlin. Erscheinungsdatum: 16. April 2026.
ISBN 978-3-86971-154-6
The book intertwines the artist’s observations, memories and history with the actions of Homo alpinus in the glaciated natural environment.
It brings together autobiographically and thematically interlinked travel sketches and essays from Equatorial Africa and South America, Western Asia and Switzerland. Thus it reads like a literary echo of the “Glaciology in Pictures” that grew out of Schwartz’s interdisciplinary exchange between visual art and the natural sciences first published as While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey (2017).
Drawing on selected photographs from this ongoing “Glaciology in Pictures,” the book’s ten chapters address the fluctuating glacier repertoire and its roles as a gauge of anthropogenic global warming, an endangered reservoir of resources, a vanishing archive of climate and cultural history, a site of glacio-archaeological discovery, a metaphor of memory and cognitive space, a subject of art and literature, and a factor in national identity, shaken most recently by the collapse of the Birch Glacier in Switzerland’s Lötschental in 2025.
Against the backdrop of a heating planet, the author’s reflections turn on man’s double role as both an endlessly consuming, quixotically failing subduer and a Candide-like re-thinker capable of adaptation and self-restraint along the path of progress.
Publication
«Der Gletscher ist eine Metapher für eine geschundene, versehrte Welt»
Das Magazin No 27/5 July 2025
Supplement to Tages-Anzeiger, Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung und Der Bund
Interview in German, and illustrated with some of the photographs of the Birch Glacier, taken 24 hours before the glacier collapse on 28 May 2025 resulting in the ice and rock debris flow that destroyed the village of Blatten, Lötschental, Switzerland.
Publication
Climate Change is Happening.
Why Don’t We See It?
19 June 2025
The Walrus
Exhibition
Zur Zeitlichkeit im Eis
Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Solothurn
20 January – 12 May 2024
Explore views: Kunstmuseum Solothurn
View exhibition announcement
Download exhibition flyer (In german)
Related past exhibitions While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey (2018-2019) and Ice Age Our Age. Ballads and Enquiries Concerning the Last Glacial Maximum (2012)
Publication
Eine Lektion in sehendem Denken
Das Werk des Schweizer Fotografen Daniel Schwartz
Das Magazin No 29/30 September 2023
Supplement to Tages-Anzeiger, Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung und Der Bund
Exhibition
Tracings
Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne
30 September 2023–4 February 2024
Book by Thames & Hudson (Publication date: 14 September 2023)
Explore views: Kunstmuseum Luzern
View exhibition announcement
Download exhibition flyer (In german)
Collective Exhibition
by the VII Photographers
See through the Noise
VII Foundation, Alexandra Boulat Campus, Arles
26 June 2023–January 2024
theviifoundation.org/see-through-the-noise
Online Talk
A Question of Ice
18 May 2022
Photo London
Listen to Daniel Schwartz and Jean de Pomereu in conversation with by William L. Fox, Nevada Museum of Art
Video starts with the presentation From Delta to Glacier (Time code 18:20). It can be viewed from the start
Group exhibition
Imagine: Reflections on Peace
A Multimedia Exhibition by the VII Foundation
United States Institute of Peace, Washington
2 June–1 August 2022
imagine.reflectionsonpeace.org
imagine.reflectionsonpeace.org/afghanistan
Group exhibition
Intertwingled. The role of the Rug in Arts, Crafts and Design
Galleria Nazionale Arte Moderna e Contemporaneo, Roma
22 March–4 September 2022
To the right of the door:
Cotton Fields. Syr-Darya Region, Uzbekistan, 3 October 2002
Inkjet print from Color Negativ, 2022 (Image size 70 x 70 cm)
From: Travelling through the Eye of History
The work is shown together with Emilio Vedova, Senza titolo, 1953-59, 35 x 49 cm, mixed media on paper (above) and
Jackson Pollock, Painting A, 1950, 57 x 77 cm, oil on cardboard (to the right)
Online Publication
10 July 2020
Photo London
View P.L. Academy Publication, Issue 10 (including two short videos)
Art Prize
Olten, Switzerland, 11 November 2019
Art Prize Canton of Solothurn, 2019
View award speech by Daniel Schwartz (English subtitles)
Publication
The Friend
Navid Kermani on Daniel Schwartz and their Walk in the Hindu Kush that didn’t happen
Das Magazin No 03/19 January 2019
Supplement to Tages-Anzeiger, Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung und Der Bund
Editorial
One amusing work of travel literature that scarcely anyone in the German-speaking world has read is Eric Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Published in 1958, it describes the attempt of two English eccentrics – one of them the then 24-year-old Newby – to climb a twenty-thousand-foot peak in Afghanistan. Neither has any experience of mountaineering and their adventure, predictably, ends in fiasco. Which matters not one jot, at least not as far as the quality of the writing is concerned, so glorious are Newby’s descriptions of the country and its people, so dryly self-deprecating his account of his own exploits.
When Swiss photographer Daniel Schwartz approached me last spring and suggested that he and his friend the famous German writer and Orientalist Navid Kermani repeat Newby’s ‘walk’, I therefore agreed without hesitation. Both men are seasoned travellers and were concerned less with Newby’s affectation of dandyism than with documenting how the glaciers in this dangerous corner of the world are in retreat. Schwartz was to take photographs while Kermani, who speaks Farsi, engaged the locals in conversation. But then Kermani had to pull out at the last minute so that Schwartz set off without him, camera in hand. Back home in Cologne, Kermani did what he does best, as anyone who has read his magisterial novel Dein Name will confirm: he continued writing up his life, recording his experiences one day at a time. And of course he reflected on the trip he had had to cancel, his friendship with Daniel, his worries as a father. For this issue, therefore, we have brought together two very different bodies of work, which to our mind complement each other perfectly.
Finn Canonica, Editor-in-Chief, Das Magazin, Zürich
Lead
The idea was for Swiss photographer Daniel Schwartz and German author Navid Kermani to take a walk in the Hindu Kush for Das Magazin. But when Kermani had to pull out at the last minute, Schwartz set off alone to photograph the melting glaciers. Kermani’s text is not, therefore, a travelogue, bur rather a written record of a year spent at home in Cologne – his musings on the trip he never took, an illness in the family, the never-ending heat wave of the summer of 2018, and much more besides. By no means least, it is a touching portrait of Daniel Schwartz, the friend he had to send off into the world without him.
(Followed by extracts from Navid Kermani’s journal)
Exhibition
While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey
Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur
10 November 2018–17 February 2019
View SRF Swiss Public TV program (9 January 2019) on Daniel Schwartz and Sebastiao Salgado (Swiss german/German)
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.
Podcast
A Small Voice.
Conversations with Photographers.
Documentary film
Beyond the Obvious
Daniel Schwartz
Photographer
A portrait, placing the photographer’s glacier odyssey for the book and exhibition While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey in the context of his endeavours spanning more than three decades.
70 min
Director Vadim Jendreyko
Screenplay Frank Vorpahl & Vadim Jendreyko
Producer GoldenEggProduction
In co-production with Sternstunde-Kunst, SRF / Swiss Public TV
In association with Mira Film
Beirut Art Film Festival
Beirut, 20–25 November 2018
www.bafflebanon.org
DOKUARTS 11
Berlin, 4–21 October 2018
Download flyer
24th Film Festival Della Lessina
Bosco Chiesanuova, Italy, 24 August–2 September, 2018
www.ffdl.it
Download program
7ième Deauville Green Awards
Festival international des productions audiovisuelles
pour le développment durable et les éco-innovations
Deauville, France, 19–20 June, 2018
www.deauvillegreenawards.com
Trophée d’Argent dans la compétition Documentaire
Festival International du Film sur l’art
Montréal, 8–18 March 2018
www.artfifa.com
53. Solothurner Filmtage
Solothurn, Switzerland, 25 January–1 February 2018
www.solothurnerfilmtage.ch
Profile
Die Dunkelkammer ist die andere Küche
Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Zürich, 27. Dezember 2017
Monograph
While the Fires Burn. A Glacier Odyssey
Thames & Hudson
October 2017
