Immerse yourself in colorful freshwater worlds

In the special exhibition on Michel Roggo's Freshwater Worlds, rare marine animals breathe a sigh of relief in crystal-clear water, the beauty of the Sense River competes with that of Lake Baikal, the Iguazú Waterfalls, the Ross Ice Shelf, and numerous other places with strange-sounding names. What unites the photographs shown is the water theme:

To get to the bottom of this, Michel Roggo spent seven years traveling the world and taking a close-up look at streams, rivers and lakes from around 40 different locations in his "Freshwater Project. His goal: to document as many of the world's major freshwater types as possible, including underwater. To do this, the now 69-year-old jumped into the water with a diving mask and snorkel. "We know what coral reefs look like," he says, "but what about the waters on our doorstep? I'm always looking for interesting scenes with dramatic light - in the algae of a pond or under the ice of a mountain stream. These habitats are incredibly beautiful, but hardly ever seen."

Working under adventurous conditions

The Natural History Museum in Fribourg (Switzerland) created an exhibition from Roggo's photographs, which is now on display at the Zoological Museum of the University of Zurich. It lets visitors immerse themselves in magical water landscapes and marvel at exotic animal and plant worlds, ice and rock formations. Various making-of films illustrate the photographer's often long journeys and the extreme working conditions he and his assistants encountered. For his Freshwater Project, Roggo almost always works with local guides, including indigenous people, biologists, dive guides, boatmen and pilots. "Michel Roggo impressively captures the planet's most important freshwater biotopes," says Isabel Klusman, director of the Zoological Museum, "an important step in making these sensitive and often endangered habitats visible and known."

Animals, plants, ice, rocks and springs

The exhibition follows five main themes, including water as a dynamic habitat for animals that are required to perform great adaptive feats. Difficult conditions such as turbid, low-light conditions, icy, acidic or oxygen-poor water are also encountered by plants, which nevertheless grow into veritable aquatic paradise gardens. Glaciers and ice caps in the polar regions, where two-thirds of all fresh water is stored frozen, are included in the exhibition, as are rock formations that are created by water and shaped and destroyed by erosion. Finally, Roggo's paintings are also devoted to springs, where groundwater rises to the surface within the water cycle. Pure water is essential to life, and so almost all springs in the industrialized world are tapped. In Roggo's photographs, the underwater worlds of those springs that are still completely untouched present themselves all the more magnificently.

About Michel Roggo: