Photography by Alberto Venzago
Where people and their stories feel at home
The Storchen Zürich is a place of traces, a house where the past is not displayed but lived. Beyond its windows, the Limmat flows on, calm and constant, opening the view onto the Old Town, the Grossmünster and Lake Zurich.
In this exceptional setting, Alberto Venzago’s photographs take on a particular resonance. They speak of a nature older than any city, and greater than any story we could ever tell about it. That is why these works feel so at home here. Two forms of storytelling meet: that of a house which has welcomed people from around the world for more than six centuries, and that of an artist who reveals what is so often overlooked. Between them flows the Limmat – a quiet bridge between past and present.
The absence of the human
For more than fifty years, I have been photographing people, they stand at the center of my work. My studio was the world. Landscapes were never just backdrops, yet they remained supporting actors. As in opera, the scenery serves the action: the landscape is there to support, not to dominate.
Over the past fifteen years, my gaze has begun to shift. More and more, my attention turned to those spaces that had once been only background – to water, clouds, light, architecture, the traces of time and transience. The stage began to develop its own language.
The large-format photographs shown here are the result of that evolution. There are no people in them: no faces, no bodies, no heroes, no victims. It is the absence of the human that defines these images. What was once background becomes foreground. Nature assumes the leading role. Water, earth, sky, light, and matter tell their own stories. And yet, the human remains present, not through appearance, but through traces.
About Alberto Venzago
Alberto Venzago is a photographer, photojournalist, filmmaker, and artist. He has worked for MAGNUM, and his photographs have appeared in LIFE, Stern, and GEO. He has received numerous international awards, including the ICP Infinity Award in New York City. His works are represented in many museums and private collections. He is a Hall of Fame member of the Art Directors Club Switzerland. Venzago lives in Zurich and Hiva Oa.
Water
At the Staubbach Falls, the Passugg spring, and the Trümmelbach Falls, I encounter water in three entirely different states: as a dramatic plunge, as a hidden origin, and as a geological force of creation.
At the Staubbach Falls, I go to the place where the postcard ends. High on the edge of the cliff, the photograph captures a moment that, in reality, never stands still: the frozen instant immediately before the fall.
The spring at Passugg is entirely different. Deep within the mountain, an almost sacred space emerges. The water comes forth from the darkness, inconspicuous and quiet – like a hidden sanctuary, a Grail-like place. Here, water reveals itself as origin. And finally, the Trümmelbach Falls. Invisible from the outside, the water has been carving its way through the rock for thousands of years, creating spaces of cathedral-like scale. No architect designed these chambers; they are the work of water’s patience. Water is the great sculptor of time – soft and yet stronger than granite. Perhaps these photographs are therefore not about water itself. They are about time. About time that falls, flows, disappears, and creates.
Forest
The forest photographs consist of several hundred individual images. They were created at night by “painting” trees and vegetation with flashlights over the course of several hours. The finished image is not a moment in time, but a construct of time, space, and light.
In nature, there is only one source of light: the sun. In my work, light comes from multiple directions simultaneously. Familiar landscapes are transformed into surreal spaces suspended between observation and imagination. The black and white intensifies this process and directs attention toward structure, form, and light.
Perhaps these works are therefore less about nature than about perception. Even closer to my approach is a thought by Paul Klee:
“Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”
The forest becomes a stage on which nature is transformed into something anthropomorphic. The trees seem to stand, to wait, to observe. What we see is less a landscape than an apparition.
Glaciers
The glacier images were created over several years, all photographed from a helicopter. Only from the air do their true dimensions reveal themselves. What appears as landscape from the ground becomes, from above, an abstract topography of ice, stone, water, and light – crossed by veins, fractures, scars.
These photographs do not document a place so much as a process. They show vanishing. Glaciers are among the oldest visible witnesses of our planet. Today, we witness their slow disappearance.
Nowhere is this more striking than at the Rhone Glacier. Each summer, part of its surface is covered with enormous white blankets to protect the ice from the sun. The fabric resembles bandages laid over an injured landscape – or a shroud. The photograph becomes a metaphor for care, despair, and impermanence.
In the glaciers, water becomes time – a force that comes and goes, shapes, and dissolves.
Mountains
The Alps are probably among the most photographed subjects in Switzerland. The real question, then, is not how to photograph a mountain, but how to look at it. The challenge lies not in finding a new mountain, but a new way of seeing.
I am not a patient person. Yet nature photography demands precisely that quality which contradicts my nature: the ability to wait. Not to act, not to interfere – but simply to observe. To wait, to look, to wait again.
The mountains are in constant flux, though we take them as symbols of permanence. Light writes endlessly new stories upon the same landscape. The word “photography” literally means “writing with light.” It is not the rocks that shape the picture, but the light moving across them. Black and white intensifies this experience. Perhaps these images speak less of the Alps than of a state of looking.
For the connection between light, patience, and perception, I am reminded of a line by Peter Zumthor:
“I believe that things possess a silence.” – Peter Zumthor
That is exactly what I feel in the Engadin snowscapes – not drama, not spectacle, but a great, almost meditative silence. And this silence ultimately unites all four chapters of this exhibition: Forest, Glaciers, Water, and Mountains – different manifestations of the same search for time, light, and transience.
