Drawings, Photographs, Papers, and Notes From Nowhere
Nothing, nothing beats the rare occurrence of life before death: Go see this intriguing piece by Goeff Manaugh on Greater Los Angeles and the eternal search of the modern nomad. If you needed a reason to not kick the art blog folder out of your RSS feed just yet, here is one.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Another note on that German thing: I’m sure most of you have looked at the online excerpts of Karl Hoecker’s Auschwitz photo album which has been all over the news in recent days (a good edit is here).
A friend of mine just sent me this link to Heinrich Himmler’s infamous Posen-Speech, from a secret meeting of SS officers in Poland on October 4, 1943.
If you found the photos from Auschwitz chilling, you may want to listen to that speech (subtitles in English). This is how the speech ends: “But altogether we can say: We have carried out this most difficult task for the love of our people. And we have taken on no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character.”
(I am posting this because I think that your cultural background together with your mindset will finally determine what kind of images you make. Now back to more traffic cones.)