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.

Aerial photography had a special place in the business of the legendary former Swiss airline Swissair. Walter Mittelholzer (1894- 1937), aviation pioneer and one of Swissair's founders, trained as a photographer before turning to aviation. The airline had a specialised subsidiary, Swissair Photo AG, producing well over 100,000 pictures between 1931-2001, when Swissair ceased operations, and still exists as an independent enterprise, BSF Swissphoto. The photographs show landscapes, towns and villages, and mountains, but also industrial plants, infrastructures, and individual buildings in Switzerland and abroad. Swissair - Aerial Photography features around 300 striking, beautiful and informative images, revealing changes in landscape and settlements over nearly a century. It is also an inventory of lost elements making a landscape, untamed rivers, orchards, receding glaciers or vanished historical buildings that shows how an idyllic agricultural country turned into one of the most densely inhabited places over a few decades. With an introductory essay that explores the content of the collection now held at ETH Bibliothek and what can be read from these images today, Swissair - Aerial Photography provides an illuminating look at the history of aerial photography in Switzerland.