In two weeks, I will return to the Alps.
The coming months will take me across Switzerland and into France. Onto glaciers, along exposed ridges and into the high alpine landscapes that have formed the foundation of my photographic work.
But I do not think of the mountains as my studio.
They are not a place of creation.
They are a place of experience.
And if I am fortunate, they occasionally reveal something worth carrying home. Not perfection. Not spectacle. But fleeting moments of beauty. Full of imperfection. Rawness. Harshness. And, at times, great kindness.
In an age of constant connectivity, endless information and perpetual distraction, high mountains hold a particular fascination. Not because they provide answers, but because they remove much of the noise.
With increasing altitude, the world gradually reduces itself to what matters most. The next step. The weather. The condition of the snow. One's own awareness.
High mountains are a place of radical presence.
Up there, many of the things that seem important in everyday life quickly lose their significance. At the same time, other qualities gain weight: attention, focus, humility and the ability to fully inhabit the present moment.
It is within this tension that my work emerges.
I am interested not only in the geological transformation of these landscapes, but in the way extreme nature transforms human perception. How thoughts shift. How emotions change. How our understanding of the world and of our own place within it begins to evolve.
The photographs are not created on photographic journeys.
They are created while mountaineering.
On long approaches before dawn. During hours spent on ice. Along exposed ridges. In fleeting moments when the camera becomes capable of capturing something that existed first as an experience.
The images are neither a documentation of a route nor a record of a summit.
They are fragments of an encounter.
Monochromatic spaces suspended between fragile beauty and monumental natural force. Between silence and movement. Between permanence and continual transformation.
The coming weeks in the Swiss and French Alps mark the next chapter of this exploration.
Not with the intention of producing specific images.
But with the hope of once again finding those rare moments in which extreme nature and human perception enter into dialogue.
Some of the work created during these months will later become part of a new solo exhibition.
For now, however, it is time to head back into the mountains.
To the place where the work begins.