For almost twenty years, the Swiss photographer Richard de Tscharner has been travelling the globe, seeking out regions remote from human civilization in Africa, Asia and the Americas, while still finding time to focus on difficultly accessible sites in Europe, most notably in the Alps.
While the current trend in landscape photography is for the man-altered forms, which correspond to a timeframe of essen-tially two hundred years, Richard de Tscharner's interest is in deep geological time, or what the historian Fernand Braudel has called the longue durée.
Such a timespan treats the earthly elements as unceasingly changing, sculpted in fascinating form by wind and rain, or disturbed violently by volcanic activity, over millennia or eons. This long view, this sense of deep time, does not preclude de Tscharner recording traces of past civilizations, reminders that our own, current way of life is in all likelihood equally ephe-meral.
Over two decades, Richard de Tscharner has produced a varied oeuvre that balances grand, sweeping views of moun-tains, seas, glaciers, forests and deserts, with close studies of rock, wood, plant, and water in all its forms. In art history, we usually associate such notions of deep time with the 18th century notion of the sublime, that force in nature which inspires a sense of awe in the human mind. Inspired as well by the music of Gustave Mahler, who once advised, „if you think you're boring your audience, go slower, not faster," Richard de Tscharner adopts a deliberatively contemplative approach, taking the time necessary to scrutinize a scene from every angle before endeavoring to interpret it. William A. Ewing, Curator
