Tracings

The first longterm appraisal of the photography of Daniel Schwartz. Daniel Schwartz's photographs explore human activities set against an immense range of political geography and cultural history, touching on such monumental themes as imperial warfare, ancient history, environmental collapse and the vanishing cryosphere. Tracings reveals a body of work that is humanistically motivated and anchored in reality, blurring the divide between photojournalism and art. Positioning Schwartzs work to date in the wider history of the medium, Tracings draws together themes tackled in five monographs concerned with cultural history, political geography and the environment published by Thames & Hudson between 1986 and 2017. Essays by Beat Wismer, Giovanna Calvenzi and Carolin Emcke examine the ways Schwartzs documentary photography intersects with the arts; look at photographic affinities and methods in Schwartzs work, analysing the narrative of his previous books; and study Schwartzs depiction of the individual at work, and how photographs of human activities are interwoven with photographs of nature. Tracings is not so much a retrospective as a project tracing and continuing an evolutionary line through all Schwartzs projects to date.