About Me

René Algesheimer is a photographic artist, author, educator, and public speaker. In his main time, he works as a data scientist, marketing scholar, and coach. In consequence, Algesheimer’s practice is on the one hand rooted in his career as a scientist and university professor studying social structures, while his poetic and spiritual reflections of the present have formed through his education in music, photography, and the arts. Combining these two backgrounds allows him to see things beyond mere place.

Throughout his life, Algesheimer has felt inspired by music, by words, recently by images. What all these wonderful tools have in common is that they mirror the mystery, monumentality, and multiplicity of nature. Life is inseparable from nature and so are we. Although we are part of nature we are often so separated from it.

Nature is sturdy but fragile. We are close but distant. For that reason, it has never been enough for Algesheimer to just observe, he always wanted to be involved, being part of it. Remote wilderness areas are what he is searching for, discoverable through meandering around, bushwhacking through the woods, or uphill backpacking. For that, he prefers the off-season periods in life.

René Algesheimer is a member of Nature First. Learn more about his engagements in this blog article about Supporting Our Environment.

Artist Statement

René Algesheimer belongs to a group of contemporary photographers for whom the experience of the outer natural world is neither separable from its eco-social context nor the inner conflicts between ego and heart. Instead, he portrays landscapes as alternative realities with higher meanings, where photography becomes something else.

For Algesheimer, photography is a poetic and allegorical medium: a means of discovering the enduring connections between the elements and the whole and of portraying nature as a fragile but persistent beauty. The landscapes he photographs are connective structures of a higher order who interact with intimate forms of lower order. They reflect visual connections and reaching out into another world of possibility.

Algesheimer is inspired by the Japanese philosophy of “Ikigai,” a purified form of beauty and truth. Using a visual language informed by minimal art and the ancient Japanese ink painting pine trees of Tohaku Hasegawa, he focuses on reducing simple, geometric, primary structures leaving viewers to interpret his photographs with the essence of what they are about.

Algesheimer’s photographs show a living world in transition, which exists for fleeting moments in time—preserving a memory of the landscapes.

He lives in the French-speaking part of Switzerland.