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.
Last week, a business trip took me outside of New York, a real adventure for the Europe-based Manhattanite – and therefore a welcome occasion for musings about food, as it relates to the meaning of life. Bear with me if, as an Italian lover of poetry, I tell you that for Dante, the bad is the mere absence of the good. The deeper down in hell you are, the further away you are from God. Beware, the bad is not a counter-force to the good! It’s merely the lack of the good. Now, looking at one’s plate at a number of restaurants all over the world, the phrase ‘absence of good’ rings very true. But is Dante right? Isn’t there more to bad food?
So, one of these evenings, I’m sitting in the most ridiculously over-ambitious restaurant in my hotel, with nothing less than a harp player entertaining me and the only other, single female diner in the whole room. Given the fact that I was going to sit there on my own, I thought I was going to order two small dishes, so as to give me something to do with my lonely evening. The first was shrimp in a herb sauce. Sounds like a safe bet. But wait until some chef (why is no one simply a cook?) puts the shrimp on rosemary branches, and grills them all for the same amount of time, irrespective of the fact that they differ in size. So one shrimp was uneatably raw, and the rest were uneatably well done. The second course, which I expected to be a selection of cheese with fruit (you see the reasoning here, I was going for the simplest possible), turned out to be a whole brie baked in some terrible crust, with something perhaps best described as strawberry jam around it.
Now here I’m sitting, pitying the harp player, a harmless student, put into this depressing position of playing for an empty room by the restaurant’s hopeless pretensions. My thoughts drift back to the good and the bad: Is the bad a force that aims to assert itself, even if it has to come in the guise of ambition for the good?
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!
