Award-winning photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer typically traverse the globe documenting people from all backgrounds and cultures. Now they are staying in Switzerland, and recently captured the quiet solitude of Geneva, on assignment for “Das Magazin” (similar to the NYT Magazine of Switzerland). With their son in tow, a young photographer in the making, they are seeing things from a whole new perspective.
Mathias Braschler and Monika work as a team, and they are used to having their 8-year old son Elias tag along sometimes. Only now, he’s with them almost all of the time.
In Geneva this month, working on a new project titled EMPTY SWITZERLAND for “Das Magazin” (similar to the NYT Magazine of Switzerland) they have been shooting half panoramas of the emptiness of the Swiss cities, airports, highways and tourist destinations.
With Elias in tow, he shoots his own images with the camera he got last year on his birthday. While Mathias was trying to capture the emptiness of The Place de Neuve, Elias was taking photos of the few people walking by in face masks. “Having your child with you, can sometimes help to see things differently, since he is looking very differently through a camera and has other ideas,” Mathias says.
“Critically acclaimed portrait photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer began collaborating in 2003 on the occasion of their “About Americans” project. Since then they have specialized in elaborate projects documenting people from all backgrounds and cultures. Major projects include “Faces of Football”, a series of portraits of the world’s most important soccer players; “China”, portraits of people from all social backgrounds and regions of China; and “The Human Face of Climate Change”, a series of environmental portraits of people from around the world affected by climate change. One of their more recent projects “Act Now!” a portrait series of famous climate activists, was a collaboration between Braschler & Fischer, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).”
