Haiti has long been known as a benighted place of poverty and corruption. Even before the 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the country, it was beset by difficulties inextricably rooted in its history of rebellion and revolution. Since gaining independence from France in 1804, following the only successful slave revolt in the history of the world, Haiti s past has been characterized by dictatorships, serious conflict, and near-constant social and political unrest, as the country struggles to define its independence and realize its promise. Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation collects 140 photographs of Haiti by Swiss photographer Thomas Kern, taken in black and white with an analogue camera over the course of twenty years of travel there. As the photographs demonstrate, the people of Haiti remain determined to realize the country s promise in the face of crushing poverty and crisis, and, behind the barrage of bad news that dominates its public image, it is a country full of hope and life. The photographs, which make up the first part of a four-part boxed set, are joined by three separate text booklets each in one of three languages: English, German, and Creole that feature texts by Kern on his work and his approach to the country, as well as two essays by Swiss journalist Georg Brunold and Haitian novelist Yanick Lahens that provide context and commentary for the images and discuss the country s people and culture, and its enduring political conflict. A powerful photographic portrait, Haiti: The Perpetual Liberation shows a different, more personal and therefore also more ordinary view of the troubled country that reaches beyond what we think we know about Haiti.

Swiss photographer Roland Iselin, born 1958, graduated from the famous photography class at the School of Design in Zurich (today Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) and also completed a Master's degree at New York's School of Visual Arts. Prior to his artistic education, he completed his studies in socio-cultural animation at Zurich-based Institute of Applied Psychology. Unguided Road Trip is Iselin's latest long-term project. Since 2011, he has been travelling his native Switzerland and his adopted second home country, the US, documenting how in either place the landscape is 'furnished' with all sorts of structures and objects. Bus stops, public toilets, gas stations. We recognise such things and make use of the convenience they offer, yet we forget about them again immediately. In small and densely populated Switzerland, the landscape is cluttered with objects that serve a specific purpose: phone and letterboxes, benches, signposts, wayside crosses. But equally, the vast and scarcely inhabited open landscapes in the US are cut-across by roads lined by mass-produced objects.Iselin has found many motifs common in both countries: memorials for victims of road accidents, cattle gates, rifle ranges with their pavilions, rest stops. A landscape's 'furniture' does not accumulate accidentally. Rather, each object is placed intentionally, and they testify, in a way, to a society's state. Iselin's images demonstrate values and ideals, showing how the design of these objects guides our behaviour. This new book brings together some 140 photographs from Iselin's Unguided Road Trip, for the first time. The images are complemented with texts by writer and photography critic Nadine Olonetzky.

Celestial mechanics have fascinated mankind in all known cultures. Many artists throughout history have been captivated by the spectacle we observe above us day and night. Swiss photographer Guido Baselgia has expanded the focus of his work on the sky, with the stellar and solar movements and phenomena as we see them from earth. In his most recent work Light Fall, Baselgia makes traceable the trajectory of celestial bodies invisible to the human eye and shows astounding occurrences of light and shadow. Taken in Norway, the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Argentina, in Ecuador, and the Swiss Alps, the images visualise the geometry of astrodynamics and celestial mechanics. His photography also captures the phenomenon of umbra, planet earth's shadow thrown into space. The new book Guido Baselgia - Light Fall features 80 stunning tritone plates. Complemented with essays by German scholar Andrea Gnam and Swiss photography critic Nadine Olonetzky, they offer a window into the light phenomena that leave us awestruck today as much as they did our ancestors.

Flowers are a perennially popular motif throughout art history. And for good reason: lush with texture and colour, a living bouquet of blooms can be made to communicate much through the masterly brushstrokes of Vincent Van Gogh or Georgia O'Keeffe, in the hands of a skilled ikebana artist, or through the lens of contemporary photography. For more than two decades, Swiss photographer Anna Halm Schudel has focused her eye on flowers, zooming in on calyxes, pistils, and leaf veins to create exuberant feasts of colours. While celebrating the wide variety of shapes and sizes that nature and human cultivation have brought us, Schudel is no less fascinated by the process of decay. As the flowers fade, wilt, and wither, she transforms them under water into images of strange, compelling beauty, to combine their delicate beauty with a stirring memento mori. Eighty strikingly beautiful colour plates are complemented by two essays that examine Schudel's symbolism and put her work in context with the history of the floral still life. As exquisite as the subject itself, this beautifully designed large book is sure to inspire appreciation for this rising Swiss artist. Text in English and German.

Glaciers in the Alps and on Greenland have been melting away slowly for decades. Global warming has increased the speed of their retreat drastically in recent years. Swiss geophysicist Alfred de Quervain (1879-1927) carried out the first survey of the Clariden glacier in the Swiss canton of Glarus and initiated and led important scientific expeditions on Greenland in 1909 and 1912. Swiss artist Martin Stutzle and photographer Fridolin Walcher also link Glarus with Greenland. Both have made the Swiss glaciers the subject of their work and, in May 2018, joined a Swiss research campaign investigating the current state of the glaciers on the world's largest island. The photographs and prints they produce reflect an intense awareness of scientific facts, yet they strike the viewer emotionally and aesthetically. This book blends the essence of glaciological and geophysical research with contemporary art and picks up on Alfred de Quervain's legacy. Prints and photographs are featured alongside three easy-to-read essays offering a concise survey of the findings of the 2018 expedition. A fourth essay comments on Stutzle's and Walcher's works and explores current trends in climate art. Text English, German and Kalaallisut (Greenlandic).

Every garden is an imagined paradise - a garden paradise that incorporates the personality of the individual who created it, but also the long history of horticulture. The book recounts the history of gardens from their likely origins in Mesopotamia to today; in chronological order and in sections with keywords, it introduces the most important styles as well as the people that have influenced developments in Europe. Although the famous and influential gardens often needed extensive funds for their creation, gardens are not designed for the privileged of this world. Whether it is an allotment, a landscape park, a cemetery, or a city park - small and large gardens interweave with the built landscape and are an inspiration for all of us.

For more than 20 years, photographic artist Tobias Madorin has been working on his series Topos. Metropolises like Barcelona and Sao Paulo, a Swiss mountain resort like Grindelwald, or foreign countries like Uganda, Indonesia and Japan: with his large scale images he explores dwellings and landscapes. Madorin creates tableaux, similar to 19th-century painters. His particular interests are places where people gather, places on the outskirts of cities along arterial roads, waste disposal sites, or areas changed and scarred by agriculture and mining. He understands such places as products of human visions and ideals, but also as result of exploitation and greed, as sites of fight for survival. Tobias Madorin - Topos is the first monographic book on Madorin's work, presenting his most important pictures from twenty years. An essay by the journalist and art critic Nadine Olonetzky comments Madorin's oeuvre and puts it in context of contemporary photography and the history of representing landscapes and cities.

The first monographic book on Dominic Büttner's art, featuring one-hundred of his 'Dreamscapes', nightly landscapes and cityscapes shot with large format view camera. Essays by Elisabeth Bronfen and Nadine Olonetzky. Text in English and German.

Transformation processes are the focus of Georg Aerni's new photographs. The Swiss photographer and artist shows plastic greenhouses that have annexed whole swathes of land for agricultural mass production, residential houses that have been built overnight on the city outskirts without construction machines and literally noiselessly. He points his lens at olive trees that have grown over centuries into figures full of character, at creepers that conquer leftover spaces between high-rises and motorways, and at mighty rock faces that are being gnawed by erosion. With the merging of art and documentation that is typical of Aerni's work, Georg Aerni-Silent Transition makes the signs of change the object of a contemplative observation and at the same time asks challenging questions: about our handling of natural resources, about the social backgrounds to cities growing out of control, about the regenerative force of nature. A decade after Aerni's first monograph, Sites & Signs, this new book showcases the artist's ongoing continuation of his photographic work through numerous individual images as well as new series. 166 beautiful colour and black-and-white plates are introduced through texts by Peter Pfrunder and Nadine Olonetzky and commented on with an essay by Sabine von Fischer. Text in English and German.

Cecile Wick's work, oscillating among photography, painting, and drawing, is one of the most important oeuvres in contemporary Swiss art. Solo exhibitions in various galleries and a large retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Berne have recently showcased her prints and etchings to great acclaim."Cecile Wick. Colored Waters" offers readers the first glimpse of the artist's more recent photographs and, in particular, drawings. Watercolors, ink drawings, inkjet prints and photographs are presented in series, putting media and motifs in a dialogue and revealing new aspects of Wick's work. Around 160 color reproductions of artworks are complemented with essays by Martin Jaeggi and Nadine Olonetzky on subjects such as light, traces, signs, buildings, nature, and rhythm in Wick's oeuvre.

Swiss artist Barbara Davi, born 1971, primarily works with the medias of installation and photo-collage. Following her artistic education at Zurich's School of Art and Design (today Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK) and Lucerne School of Art, Davi has developed her original style, working in three-dimensional space as well as on two-dimensional surfaces, using architectural and geometric shapes and elements. Using wooden slats or a table, lines or a circular shape, light beams or a shadow, Davi creates quasi-drawings in space and photo-collages of a magical, almost three-dimensional depth. Her motifs emerge from a sequence of deliberations, from her 'train of thought'. This first monograph on Barbara Davi features her striking work from the past ten years. Around 100 plates in colour and black and white are complemented by essays on Davi's way of working in her preferred media.