Endangered Landscapes

A research based exhibition by Anne Elisabeth Toft
The exhibition Endangered Landscapes featured photobooks on alpine motifs. It painted a picture of the transformation of the Alpine landscape as expressed in books from the twentieth century. The show also illuminated a specific photobook typology and genre dealing with Alpine culture and architecture. It testified to the photographers’ fascination with the often hard-to-reach places, the masses of snow, and the towering mountain peaks. In these books, you can ‘visit’ places that once were, but no longer exist. The books tell of small local communities, traditional rural life in the Alps, and commercialization of the mountains, including ski resorts and alpine tourism. And they present a number of unique natural formations and landscapes that are about to disappear due to climate change and industrialization.

The exhibition illuminated specific aspects of ‘Off Balance’, the Photobook Week Aarhus theme, and it contextualized the two related exhibitions on Nanna Debois Buhl's and Walter Niedermayr's photobooks, both of which reflected on the Anthropocene and how society’s understanding of nature and landscape is constructed and represented through different visual media.