(excerpt from correspondence)
"The metamorphosis is profound, I know that it is the nature of chrysalids to transform into something completly different, but not to that point!
I liked these entomological windows, these crackles of light that multiplied in facets and rays. Moments of a crystalline fermentation And here is the open sea of the mountain: what a bloom! No more spaces that redouble themselves but open it.
These new images seem to almost always be dominated by a big curve. My favorite, the entrance to the cave, shows it obviously. But this invisible orb is found in almost all compositions, like the immense arch of a celestial bridge, vaulted to infinity.
Confronting the mountain was always a tough test for photography. Between the two, there is a break in scale. The result is often very small. We end up with bonsai mountains. Here, the photographic miniaturization totally admits its unrealism. The thought of Emmanuel Kant is realized before our eyes: we move from this beautiful balance that calls the rigid photographic framing to an immensity that exceeds us, which aspires us and yet rejects our derisory smallness: the Sublime.
Miniaturization and flattening. In general, the modeling of the shadows, the strong point of photography, brings us back to a mosaic of gray and white plates. The best photographers of the mountain know how to assume this laminated space.
But here you have rejected the problem. With an icy irony - as it is appropriate to the climate of the heights - you did not photograph the mountain that much so that the hotel could throw itself in front. These monstrous termite nests mimic the lines of the surrounding peaks, with the silly goodwill of an architecture subject to tourist performance. So the image doubles up. The colossal truth of geology disappears behind tourist silos, so that a shrug of the shoulder of the earth would be enough to rip it.
A Luigi Ghirri would have made us laugh. You do not cry, but you feel a sad majesty, beyond any social criticism, and a disillusioned greatness. By the slow rise of the lines, the subtle gray colors of an icy atmosphere, a little misty and very pure.
December 2004
