Contact
mail@tobiashitsch.com
+41 76 489 5153
About
Tobias Hitsch is a freelance photographer born in Switzerland in 1975.
His first self-assigned project was the documentation of a 75-year-old milkmaid's reclusive life in the Austrian alps. He joined her, her cows and the occasional visiting fox during three summers beginning in 1998. The woman led an almost self-sufficient life in complete solitude, eating her self-made dairy products, as well as the berries and mushrooms she found. Although she had no running water, no electricity and no means of communication, she was flown to her little wooden hut at each beginning season by helicopter. (>10 images)
Between 1999 and 2005, Tobias repeatedly travelled to Bolivia for a long-term project about the indigenous people of El Alto and adjacent La Paz. Lying at up to 4100 meters above sea level, this is one of the world's highest cities and home to many of Bolivia's poorest people, at the time largely neglected by the government. (>28)
From summer 2005 he was based in Cairo for eight months, covering what should have been Egypt's free and fair parliamentary and presidential elections (>8). During this period, he also focused on the capital's daily life (>12), its throngs of tourists (>16), some of its surrounding satellite cities (>8) and the Zabbaleen (>16), a community of Coptic Christians that collect much of the city's waste. From Cairo, he travelled on to the West Bank, working on stories about the Balata refugee camp (>8) near Nablus and visiting, shortly after his death, a "martyr's" family in Jenin (>10).
In early 2006, after Hamas was elected, he has worked for eight weeks in Gaza, covering what was the beginning of a new chapter for the Palestinians. He returned during autumn 2008 and again after the Israeli assault on Gaza in December and January 2008-2009. Tobias has so far spent half a year in the Gaza Strip and continues to go back for his long-term project "The lost key".
In 2007, a year before the Olympic Games, he travelled to China documenting the side effects of the country's economic boom and related social developments in five major cities (>14), with a focus also on the migrant workers (>8). Taking the train from central China over the Tibetan Plateau he later arrived in Lhasa to work on issues about emigration and oppression as Chinese authorities continue to dissolve Tibetan culture by assimilation (>22).
Having visited India for the first time in late 2007, Tobias returned to Calcutta in early 2010 to continue "Hour by hour", his personal portrait of the city. With "Promise of the bridge" he started a new project in Uttar Pradesh, a north Indian state bordering Nepal, documenting the life around a bridge in an otherwise almost desert-like landscape. The trip concluded with a first glimpse at Kashmir, which resulted in the essay "Echoes from the valley".
Between autumn 2010 and spring 2011, Tobias Hitsch was based in London as an Artist-in-Residence. Currently living in Switzerland, he has put down his camera at the end of 2011 and is now focusing on writing.