Since the mid-2000s, as a result of global warming, numerous glaciers in the Alps have been partially covered with blankets, in an attempt to slow the melting of the ice during the summer months. These hybrid and ephemeral landscapes, silent witnesses to human intervention and a threatened natural world, have been the subject of much interest from photographers and artists, based in Switzerland and abroad.

Compiled for the first time in a book by art historian Nathalie Dietschy, these photographs are both startling and fascinating in their disturbing beauty and symbolic significance. Interweaving the history of art and photography, interviews with the artists, and studies of affects and reception of the works, the author brings to light the multiple meanings of these new landscapes of the Anthropocene and challenges our understanding of them. Through a wide range of artistic perspectives that express the challenges of preserving an endangered geological and cultural heritage, this book explores attempts to hold back the inescapable, captured in its last breath by photographic records.

In a rather fortuitous convergence of themes considering the Foundation’s recent support for its founder Richard de Tscharner’s book on the Alpine Passes of Switzerland, and in light of the Foundation’s past support for the engaging art history research of Nathalie Dietschy, it was a natural choice for the Foundation to aid the publication of her newest book presenting various photographers’ work on the subject of geotextiles draped over Alpine glaciers in a desperate attempt to preserve them. This poignant and metaphorical symbol of our times is a theme of particular interest to the Foundation’s creator and frequent subject of his photography, that of deep time: the traces and scars wrought on to the landscape of the Earth by time and by nature, including, significantly, by those very glaciers that are now disappearing – a reminder of the relentless pursuit of time and our ever-changing landscape, with its alternating advance and retreat of ice and fire.