Search results for ""Author Nicole Graf""

Documented Landscape, the seventh volume in the Pictorial Worlds series, presents a selection of images from the archives of the Geobotanical Institute Rubel and of Carl Schroeter, which are being kept as part of the ETH Zurich's extensive image archive. Founded by Eduard Rubel (1876-1960) in 1918 in Zurich and later donated to the ETH, the 'Geobotanical Institute Rubel' conducted pioneering research in the area of botanical biodiversity in the Alps. Rubel's teacher, the botanist and ETH professor Carl Schroeter (1855-1939), was himself a pioneer of biodiversity and landscape conservation. Rubel and Schroeter 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.

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The Image Archive of the main library at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Bibliothek) is home to a vast collection of photographs. It includes material collected by professors and other staff at the ETH, images created and collected by institutes and chairs within the ETH, but also the entire archives of companies or other institutions, such as Switzerland's legendary former national airline Swissair (1931 - 2001), or private collections bequeathed to ETH-Bibliothek. The aim of the new book series 'Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the ETH-Bibliothek's Image Archive' is to build a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. One of the collections held at the Image Archive has been put together by Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller (1879 - 1931) and his daughter Elisabeth (1910 - 1973). Unique in size, scope and period covered, it comprises 54,000 postcards from 1889 - 1980. It documents comprehensively what can be called the Golden Age of picture postcards before World War I, with its enormous diversity of motifs, radical changes of style in design and when postcards had their heyday as a communication medium. The collection's main focus is on images of individual sites, places and landscapes in 140 countries. Around 15,000 motifs are from Switzerland. The period best represented in the collection is from 1893 - 1930. The World in Pocket-size Format is a documentation of this magnificent collection. The book is also an illustrated history of this means of communication that has had its time of utmost importance in human relationships.

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Comet Photo AG was founded in Zurich 1952 to supply images to local and national media. The agency quickly built a reputation for both the documentary and aesthetic quality of its photographers' work, with the 1950s and 1960s arguably marking the culmination their achievements. Commercially, Comet Photo's heyday were the 1960s and 1970s, followed by a slow decline eventually leading to its closing-down in 1999. Comet Photo's legacy of around 1m images is now kept at ETH Zurich's Image Archive. Photo Mosaic Switzerland features some 150 images from the Comet Photo collection, documenting the rapid changes Switzerland underwent during the 20th century's later decades. They are arranged by topic, such as change and modernisation, industry, agriculture, the vanishing and vanished, the traditional and timeless, celebrities and glamour, or major events. An introductory essay tells the story of Comet Photo AG and its work and legacy, placing it among its competitors national and international, and looks also at Switzerland's social and cultural history from the 1950s to the end of the 20th century.

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Since its early days, photography has been both a tool of and subject for scientific research. Developments in photochemistry, camera construction and lense refinement made photography an extremely successful mass medium. At the same time, photography served scientific research as a key medium for observation, documentation, education and communication. ETH-Bibliothek, the main library at ETH Zurich, is holding in its Image Archive vast collections of photographs. Among them is the complete collection of the university's own Photographic Institute, an independent service and research unit between 1886 and 1979. This new book documents both the main aspects of scientific photography, illustrating the research of many disciplines while being the subject of basic research itself. Using a rich selection of images, ranging from astronomical and micro-photography, to laboratory situations and carefully illuminated experimental installations. The introductory essay investigates the interplay between photography and the world of science, and tells the story and changing role of the Photographic Institute.

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