End of summer

When I left Switzerland last Friday, a cold front just started to pound the Alps. Effectively the end of summer. This is how the Matterhorn looks today, as seen through one of the Zermatter webcams. Intriguing image.

Matterhorn revisited

Last week I was able to spend another few days in the vicinity of the Matterhorn, hoping to progress with my photo project. We had a couple of splendid late summer days, with limpid skies filled with delicate cloud arabesques, and warm, shimmering colours. Ideal for taking pictures! The idea was also to try and climb the mountain, but, despite the good weather, conditions were far from ideal. With a thin ice sheet on the rocks above 3800m the climb promised to be arduous ('auf biegen und brechen' as the locals say). My guide Martin Kopfsguter preferred to give it a try at some other time. Instead we climbed another 4000m peak in the area: the Lagginhorn. In addition, I was able to expose 27 4x5" negatives, which is a lot.

The picture above was taken with the iSweep panorama function on the little DSC-HX5. I must say I love these kinds of extreme panoramas. And all this with just an 180° sweep of the arm. Amazing ...

Power's Two Songs

Here is an interesting Q&A with photographer Mark Power. He was one of the tutors (together with Carl De Keyser and David Hurn) at the Magnum workshop I followed last year in Brighton. Power does good work, slowly and meticulously. Everything on 4x5". I respect him for a very virtuosic but also very disciplined photographic vision. I think his 26 Different Endings is the kind of urban photo project that strikes just the right kind of balance between 'context' and 'autonomy'. Obviously, there is a lot of suburban tristesse in that work too, but the project has been so cleverly conceptualized that it opens interesting vistas beyond the pictures too. I look forward to his new book. Yes, indeed, I would love to be able to 'see sound' ...

Context

One thing that triggered me lately was a comment by William Klein at the latest Visa pour l'Image photojournalism festival in Perpignan:

At a press conference in Perpignan, the celebrated American photographer has called on photojournalists to add more context to their images, as, he says about the festival's screenings that they fell like a "festival of shantytown after shantytown."

I sympathise with that view. I feel it's not only true of photojournalism in the strict sense but it applies to a lot of street and urban photography as well. As regards the latter, we have seen so many pictures of non-places, of delapidated industrial buildings, of sterile suburbia that I wonder what the point is. The study of urbanism I am currently engaged in alerts me to the superficiality of a lot of these photo projects. Maybe I am very wrong to expect that photographers think contextually and conceptually about their work. Maybe photographers do one thing, and designers do something else altogether. But Klein's remark reveals that also in the photographic world there are nagging questions about what the purview of photography is and should be.

Dévoluy

During the holidays we spent a week in a very quiet corner of the French Alps. The Dévoluy is wedged between het high peaks of the Ecrins in the East and the calcareous plateaus of the Vercors in the West, and it straddles the rigours of alpine abodes in the north and a more welcoming Mediterranean ambience in the south. Our ambition was to walk the full Tour du Dévoluy, but that didn't happen as several gites and hotels closed in the last two years so that it became very difficult to connect all the dots. So we limited ourselves to a 2-day circular trek and a few stand-alone walks. I just had the XPan with me, loaded with good old Reala. Meanwhile Fuji has ceased production. Which is a shame as I continue to love the delicate, earthy colours of that emulsion. Also the XPan continues to be a dream camera, handling superbly well and delivering dependable metering, dual format capability and very good optics. Above just a few of the snaps taken along the way.