George Gerster (30 April 1928 – 8 February 2019) was a Swiss journalist and a pioneer
aerial photographer.
Early life
Born in
Winterthur
Winterthur (; ) is a city in the canton of Zurich in northern Switzerland. With over 120,000 residents, it is the country's List of cities in Switzerland, sixth-largest city by population, as well as its ninth-largest agglomeration with about 14 ...
, in 1950 Gerster earned a doctorate at the
University of Zurich
The University of Zurich (UZH, ) is a public university, public research university in Zurich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of the ...
in Germanistik. Through 1956 he worked as an editor for the inhabitants of Zurich's "
World Week". Since then he was active as a freelance journalist with an emphasis on science reporting and flight photography.
In this photographic field of activity, he did substantial pioneer work in the 1950s and 1960s, respected not only for the technology and quality of his flight pictures, but above all for the universality and internationality of the topics.
Gerster's early photographic reportage and picture volumes detailed landscapes of North Africa. In the sixties, he documented places of archaeological interest in over 100 countries on all continents. In addition, he took breathtaking pictures of mountains and deserts, coasts and lakes, and agrarian and industrial landscapes.
George Gerster was honoured in 1976 with the
Prix Nadar
The Prix Nadar is an annual prize awarded for a photography book edited in France. The prize was created in 1955 by Association Gens d'Images and is awarded by a jury of photojournalism, photojournalists and publishing experts.
The prize is nam ...
. His photos have been shown in single and group exhibitions in Europe, Japan and the USA. He was represented by the
Rapho photo agency.
Gerster emphasized, on the one hand, the beauty of the landscape; on the other hand, he points out the endangerment to nature caused by excessive use, erosion, technology and mechanization. The fact that he did not only want to make "beautiful pictures" shows in his expert and precisely investigated captions and book texts.
Publications
* ''L'art éthiopien, églises rupestres'', éditions Zodiaque (1968)
* ''Der Mensch auf seiner Erde'', Zürich: Atlantis Verlag (1975)
* ''Flights of discovery: The Earth from Above'', Paddington Press Ltd. (1978)
* ''The Past from Above: Aerial Photographs of Archaeological Sites''. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2005. Pp. 416; ills. 516.
[Review: ]
* ''The Art of the Maze'', with
Adrian Fisher, Weidenfeld & Nicolson (1990),
* ''Paradise Lost: Persia from Above'', Phaidon, 2009 (photos made between 1976 and 1978)
Book launch
See also
* Yann Arthus-Bertrand
References
External links
Official website
English version
''Iran: A bird's eye view''.
A 2008 exhibition at the Dutch National Museum of Antiquities (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden). Accessed Dec 2, 2014.
Review of ''The Past from Above''.
A 2006 exhibition at the British Museum . Accessed Dec 2, 2014.
1928 births
2019 deaths
Swiss photographers
Aerial photographers
People from Winterthur
Remote sensing archaeologists
University of Zurich alumni
{{Europe-photographer-stub