Notes From Nowhere

If you, like me, have been overexposed to meaningful photography of abandoned gymnasiums and empty parking lots, this (admittedly self therapeutic) mix of Gustav Mahler, Janet Baker and the Dolomites is intended to alleviate the pain: Click “The Mountain Project” after the link, and please enjoy.

As I said last week, the movie also establishes the sequence of images for my upcoming book from this project, which goes to the printer before the end of the month.

There’s an interesting article (“An Inside Look at Europe’s Coolest Cities”) in the international edition of Spiegel Online on what might be the most pressing question of our time: Not how to live, but *where*. The article argues that so called “second cities” such as Dublin or Amsterdam offer a higher quality of living and working than for example NYC, London or Berlin. Given that I’ve just been to Dublin, where a single street has more nice cafés than all of Manhattan, I find myself nodding here.

Of course I am surprised that no city in the Alps––or in Switzerland in particular––is mentioned. But still, I largely agree with the piece. Using one of the main arguments of the authors (that cities beyond a certain size become inefficient), and adding the fact that modern technology allows you a productive life from pretty much anywhere, I guess one could make the point that ultimately life *in the country* is even more desirable. But maybe that’s just me, typing this amidst the thick smog and construction noise of Manhattan, on a flaky wireless connection (I have super stable high speed wireless in a small village at 6000 feet in the Dolomites––why oh why does it never seem to work reliably in the “Big Apple”?).

Here are three more images from the Mountain Project. After several rounds of editing, the total number of images is now down to 76. For the book, my goal was to arrive at 72, so there’s still some room to refine the current selection further. The main criterion for every image to make it into the project is that it has––to use a term that still sounds a little too ‘American’ to me––”wall power” (these small web versions don’t necessarily help to determine that). I’ll go with a print size of 30 x 45 inches (just right if, at times, one likes to hang combinations of images, which I’m a big fan of).

Another issue is the sequence of the images – to play around with that, the web is more useful. In a few days I’m going to publish a movie from the final edit and see how that works. Once the sequence works for the movie, I’m going to use the same sequence for the book.