High Altitude | Photography in the mountains

Alt + 1000. Festival de photographie de montagne

The book that accompanies the 2011 swiss festival of mountain photography, the renowned Alt. +1000.

As elsewhere in the world, mountains have been instrumental in defining identities in Switzerland. The theme has not ceased to fascinate artists and mountain landscapes have attracted photographers since the earliest days of the new art, when masterful work was produced during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Today mountain chains are seen differently, recognised as having an unsettling fragility in the face of their occupation by human beings. What remains of the myths linked to mountains? Are mountains still a source of inspiration for today’s artists? How do perceptions of them shift as their populations disappear, and references are increasingly centred on an urban existence? High Altitude provides some of the answers to these questions.

This book has been conceived as a companion to the Swiss photography festival, Alt. +1000, held in Rossinière, a well-known village in the foothills of the Alps. High Altitude fea- tures works of contemporary photographers who record mountains in their various and multiple states: spectacular, sublime, domesticated, constructed (even artificial!) and fright- ening. Young artists from around the world, many of whom live far from a mountainous environment, celebrate and challenge deeply-rooted myths, and each in his own way tries to interpret this elusive landscape. The famous landscape photographer Olaf Otto Becker (Germany 1959), renowned for his views of Greenland, has been invited to make a portrait of a natural park situated close to the festival. He was chosen for the breathtaking beauty of his work, a beauty that nonetheless reminds us that nature is being radically modified by climate change.

Unspoiled nature versus mountains altered by man is the theme interpreted by talented artists, whose visions are far removed from those of tourist postcards.

Nathalie Herschdorfer, curator and art historian, specialises in photography. Director of the festival Alt. +1000, curator at the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (Minneapolis, Paris, Lausanne), she was previously a curator at the Musée de l’Elysée, Switzerland, for twelve years. The numerous exhibitions she organised there led her to work with several well-known photographers and prestigious museums (the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid, Aperture Foundation in New York, etc.).