About Matthias Kalt
A way of looking.
Photography begins, for me, with attention.
I am drawn to moments when something familiar becomes extraordinary: water tracing its way through dark earth, snow reshaping a mountainside, a reflection dissolving the distinction between landscape and painting.
Years in aviation have given me opportunities to encounter the world from unfamiliar perspectives. From above, scale becomes uncertain. A river can resemble a living organism; an entire landscape can become a delicate arrangement of lines. Yet what interests me is not simply the unusual view. It is the experience of seeing something that was always there, but had remained unnoticed.
My photographs are an invitation to share that experience.
In Natural Abstraction, I explore forms and relationships found in the physical world. Their apparent unreality belongs to nature itself. Looking closely reveals more than invention could add.
The same attention also draws me towards people—and towards the ways an artist’s work can change our perception. A musical interpretation, a photograph or a conversation may become part of our inner life. Afterwards, we see or hear something differently.
The First Human Legacy grows from this curiosity. It turns from the landscapes around us towards the emotional landscapes within us, asking what remains of an encounter and how we might allow something meaningful to continue.
Whether through a photograph or a book, I hope to offer something worth spending time with.
Something that rewards a second look.
Discover Human Legacy ↗An independent perspective
On Natural Abstraction
Read the essay
The reality of nature
“The physical world and nature contain so many wonders that there is little need for the surreal.”
This observation by the British author offers a key to Matthias Kalt’s photographic vision. He is captivated by nature’s often inexplicable beauty: its inexhaustible variety of forms, colours, structures and patterns, and the changes brought by season and atmosphere.
Alongside air and earth, it is above all water, ice and snow that inspire him and challenge his eye. Their transformations—the interplay of climate, geography and physical processes—are a constant source of fascination. Topographies subtly reshape themselves; colours and tonal relationships shift; new configurations emerge. Nature seems endlessly to compose itself anew.
What do we see?
And is what we see really what we think we see?
We generally expect photography to represent reality. Yet at first glance, Kalt’s large-format photographs can appear unreal. Their subjects resist immediate recognition, as though nature had become detached from its familiar context: abstracted in the original sense of the Latin abstrahere—to draw away, to separate, to leave something out.
These photographs are nevertheless entirely rooted in reality. They do not abandon it; they offer us new ways of perceiving it. Where the photorealists once created paintings so precise that they could deceive the eye, Kalt uses the camera to reveal scenes that seem almost painted. His images inhabit an intriguing space between reality and surreality, perception and imagination, bringing photography and painting into unexpected proximity.
Reduced to their essential forms and colours, real places initially resemble abstract compositions. A closer look reveals the interplay of earth, water, snow and ice: interlocking snowfields and drifts, winding watercourses, suggestive reflections, ice formations and changing terrain. Look more closely still, and small details emerge—a bird, a piece of driftwood. In these landscapes, human figures are absent; nature occupies the frame.
Another way of seeing
What, then, do we see? We see what the photographer has seen: the same chosen detail, the same view from above, the same unfamiliar perspective. We also encounter something of what moved him in these landscapes of water, snow and ice.
In Iceland, this may be the meeting of glaciers, volcanoes and the sea: lava-black ground, sulphurous browns, coasts and waterfalls. At Lake Klöntal in the Swiss canton of Glarus, it may be the remarkable succession of moods, reflections and atmospheric changes. Here, too, nature arranges itself into images that seem painted—graphic, almost calligraphic compositions, rich in possibilities for the attentive eye.
Background
Born in Aarau, Switzerland, in 1964, I came to photography through a lifelong interest in visual expression and a career in aviation. My flying experience includes four years with Air Zermatt, eleven years with Swissair and subsequent air-transport work with the Swiss Air Force.
Alongside this, I have pursued studies and courses in visual design, typography, photography and fine-art printing. My photographs have been exhibited in Zurich, Solothurn, Fribourg and Cologne.