As part of the 8th International Photography Festival in November 2020 in Tel Aviv, Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer present their work The Human Face of Climate Change. Whereas climate change is often explained with a barrage of scientific data, graphs, hypotheses and forecasts, Braschler and Fischer have put a human face on the existential challenge facing our globe – thereby making it tangible, intimate and immediate. In a two-year journey around the world, from 2009 to 2011, the two Swiss photographers encountered a myriad of people who already bear the brunt of global warming – from the Ganges Delta over Siberia, the Swiss Alps and the Peruvian Andes to the Mojave Desert near Las Vegas. Their testimonials speak to the immediacy of the climate catastrophe, demonstrating that global warming is not merely an abstract problem for future generations, but that its consequences have already shattered the livelihoods of many around the world.
In the car, on my way to pick up my son from school. I turn on the radio. Words caught at random – “Someday the time will come to ask ourselves what this virus changed about our lives.” What it changed? So many things! It brought us together under its flag, its blue (or […]
I’m looking for that one point. For that precisely determinable moment, for that blink of an eye when it happened. Sometimes there is such a thing, a point in time that divides life into a before and after. As recorded by eyewitnesses: “It’s been different since then,” followed by a thoughtful gaze into the distance. […]
and then on the first monday of may the sun got stuck hanging in the eastern sky. our clocks continued to run, but the sun stood unaltered a few degrees above the horizon. it was another cold morning after a gray and wet weekend. the night before, the weather service had warned of ground frost, […]
See, we have lived more than one life,now we have to weigh each thingon the scales of dreams and unleashmemories that devour what the present was. (Yehuda Amichai) I So many new words have been learnt complicated words clustered beyond the door, lying in ambush. And ambush has its own gaze: it threatens, usurps, above […]
We lived in the first block of the cooperative housing project, in the third entrance, on the sixth floor. I had the large room that opened up onto the balcony. My sister had the little one with privacy. The neighborhood was built in the 1920s. There were four large blocks and six small, rectangular green […]
