open seven days a week

Douglas Mandry

For his Monuments series, Douglas Mandry uses geotextile, the material used to wrap Swiss glaciers to slow down the melting process. On this textile, Mandry prints photos of untouched glaciers found by amateur photographers from the early twentieth century. These photos marked the beginning of the rise of mass tourism and the wasteful behavior that eventually started the process of global glacier melting. Mandry also makes photograms, which is a form of photography without a camera, with a homemade wooden camera obscura. He takes this precursor of the camera, in which photos are taken by light passing through a hole, to various glaciers. Using specific aperture shutters placed in the camera obscura, light shines through pieces of ice directly onto the light-sensitive paper. As the ice melts and drips onto the photo paper, the glacier residue appears in many colors on the paper. This records the process of disappearance.

Douglas Mandry's work is currently part of the Watching the Glacier Disappear manifestation in Switzerland: https://artforglaciers.ch/en/pavillon-sicli-geneve-douglas-mandry/

Douglas Mandry, monuments, 2020, © photo: Christian van der Kooy