This special love story stems from a seminal experience: in 2007, Swiss Abroad Nicole Herzog-Verrey, who spends every summer in the Valais Alps, visited Trient Glacier with some Spanish friends. However, where just a few years before an imposing glacier snout had stood, there was nothing left. That made her very sad, writes the author in the introduction to her work “Gletscherliebe. Glacier, mon amour” (which translates as “My love for glaciers”). Following her thought-provoking experience, she wondered how, as a visual artist, she could draw attention to the consequences of climate change.
For the next 14 years, Herzog-Verrey visited Alpine glaciers in Switzerland and France every summer – totalling 40 glaciers by 2022. She compiled an illustrated book of these visits, showing the past beauty of this threatened world in all its glory: imposing glacier crevasses, turquoise blue colours and lighthearted close-ups of pieces of ice and stone resembling forbidding statues surveying the landscape from their thrones.
The author did not make any scientific statement through her work; she let her feelings guide her instead: “I was looking out for ‘my’ glaciers as if they were suffering beings.” She recorded her impressions of her visits to the vanishing ice in brief texts, which she uses as introductions to the chapters on the different glaciers. Nicole Herzog-Verrey visited some sites more than once over those years. She was especially interested in glacier snouts, where the disparity is clearest. The foot of the Rhone glacier at the Furka pass is one such example; here, protective covers are placed on the ice in the summer to preserve the ice grottos for the tourists.
Valais mountain guide Herbert Volken wrote the preface to the book. He accompanied the photographer on a two-day tour of the Aletsch Glacier. Volken wrote that he had rarely met someone who saw and appreciated the innumerable aesthetic features and wonders of nature with such a keen eye and refined sensitivity.
The author was born in Zurich in 1947, has roots in French-speaking Switzerland and lives in Madrid. She spent 25 years working as a photographer for many magazines and has been a freelance visual artist since 2005.
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