I’ve returned to the mountains for a few more days. Now, after Bernd Becher’s death, maybe someone should, just for a few decades or so, photograph mountain huts. The disappearing mountain huts. The disappearing mountain huts with their fascinatingly similar shapes, seemingly built with a great deal of attention toward design. Of course, only from a straightforward, “objective” point of view, and only under a cloudy sky. I see myself, 30 years down the road, saying something like this in an interview: “I’ve always said that I am documenting the sacred buildings of alpine farming. Alpine farming rejects all forms of art and therefore never developed its own architecture. The buildings I photograph originate directly from this purely agricultural thinking.”
Or maybe not. And in spite of the irreverence of posting this right now, I admit that I’ve spent some time walking in the mountains and thinking about the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher lately (I should stop reading interviews given by artists altogether though), and their surely well-deserved place in the art history of the 20th century. Or, at the very least, in the history of our capacity to perceive beauty where earlier generations only saw the dust of coal.
More on my Mountain Project in August. (And, yes, at this point these are about the only two out of approximately 80 images from that project that have something manmade in them – in the end I may even drop them for that very reason.)