Documented Landscape

Documented Landscape, the seventh volume in the Pictorial Worlds series, presents a selection of images from the archives of the Geobotanical Institute Rübel and of Carl Schröter, which are being kept as part of the ETH Zürich s extensive image archive. Founded by Eduard Rübel (1876-1960) in 1918 in Zurich and later donated to the ETH, the Geobotanical Institute Rübel conducted pioneering research in the area of botanical biodiversity in the Alps. Rübel s teacher, the botanist and ETH professor Carl Schröter (1855-1939), was himself a pioneer of biodiversity and landscape conservation. Rübel and Schröter were some of the earliest botanists to use photography as a means to document their research, thus making it available to a wider public and drawing attention to their early efforts in environmentalism. While the photo archives bear witness to a bygone era, their depiction of a changing landscape and progressing human interference are still strikingly on topic today. Sometimes showing near-arcadian scenes, the images are nevertheless highly realistic in their exact scientific documentation of the alpine biosphere. An in-depth introduction by historian and writer Ruedi Weidmann accompanies some ninety exceptional images selected from the comprehensive collection. Text in English and German.