Frost: Artist's Book - Hardcover

Hans Danuser (born 1953) is a leading Swiss contemporary photographer. His work is represented in various international collections, including the photography collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Frost is at the same time an artist's book and an overview of his most recent works. Since the 1980s, Danuser has explored the environments of modern science: genetic engineering, atomic energy, pathology, animal testing. His harsh, austerely beautiful b/w images depict in clinical detail the research labs and factories, inaccessible to most of us, where new energies, knowledge, and power are generated. In his most recent series, he continues to pursue his signature motifs, but pushes abstraction a step further, to a point where the photograph becomes an almost pure image. In Frozen Embryo, he shows microscopic details of frozen embryos, intricate structures and surfaces that, once deciphered, might yield the secret of human life. Strangled Body shows small body fragments of murder victims - skin as a fragile, movingly delicate membrane, precarious and precious at the same time. In Erosion, Danuser celebrates the terrifying beauty of eroded soil.

Danuser shows alarmingly vulnerable surfaces and the traces of human or natural powers inscribed on them - sublime indexes of life and death whose emotional impact is heightened by their abstract beauty. In his in-depth essay 'Topographies of Power,' Urs Stahel, director of the Fotomuseum Winterthur/Switzerland, examines the development of Hans Danuser's oeuvre and his persistent investigation of the nexus of power and knowledge. Stahel describes the evolution of Danuser's imagery from minimal and claustrophobic observations of nuclear and pharmaceutical laboratories to increasingly abstract and dense photographs of structures invisible to the bare eye.