Printed Matters: The Mountain Project

Copyright 2007 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

Well, my new book is out: “The Mountain Project”. What can I say––in a way I’m more pleased with this than with anything I’ve done before. The images are all (atypical for me) non-urban, black and white, and at some point during the project I started to ask myself why I even mess with color photography. After all, for the first four or five years of making photographs I did not use color at all, so this is sort of like going back to the roots. But then, it would not make much sense to photograph a traffic cone in black and white, nor would it make sense (to me) to photograph the Alps in color. Hence the choice was easy.

Copyright 2007 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

The Mountain Project is autobiographic in the sense that the European Alps are where I come from. And still, I’ve ignored the mountains for many years, and I did not know at all this particular region in the Dolomites, near the Venetian border, before I first went there in 2006. If I had a choice, I still would like to spend the last day of my life near the Greek archaeological site of Selinunte, Sicily. But the Dolomites come in as a close second. I hope the book gets across what kind of magical place this is; especially during winter, when you can walk for miles and miles in high altitude, in complete silence, with just snow, stone and sky around you.

Copyright 2007 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

For the technically inclined: The book includes 75 photographs on 120 pages. While this is a four color book, the images are printed from grayscale files. They come out slightly different compared to the four color C-prints – very slightly less luminous and a little more gritty, with darker shadows. The difference is miniscule though and––given the different purposes––makes sense to me. The format of the book is 7.5 x 7.5 inches.

Copyright 2007 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com

If you want to make me happy (and yourself too I hope), you can get the book here (a movie including more or less the same images as the book is here). Enjoy!

Copyright 2007 Jens Haas - www.jenshaas.com