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.

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.