Author: JH

Maybe Mia Wallace is right to say that when it comes to important subjects, there are only two ways a person can answer. There are Elvis people and and Beatles people, there are Nikon people and Canon people (but not all Elvis people are Nikon people!), there are country people and city people.

Lucky you though, because this ingenious blog not only covers images of mountains, but of traffic cones too. When I completed the Mountain Project a couple of weeks ago, that was actually the first of three books I want to make over the course of about a year. “What It Is Like To Be A Traffic Cone” will result in book number two. I’ve been doing this traffic cone thing for a number of years, and the project is now almost ripe for a book of its own.

Book number three is giving me lots of headaches at the moment. The working title is “Pax Americana”. I do not have enough strong images at this point, and this isn’t helped by the fact that, right now, I’m basically without a camera. Being a decent person, I have divorced my Canon gear before committing to a new setup. More on that in the coming weeks.

Nothing, nothing beats the rare occurrence of life before death: Go see this intriguing piece by Goeff Manaugh on Greater Los Angeles and the eternal search of the modern nomad. If you needed a reason to not kick the art blog folder out of your RSS feed just yet, here is one.

Well, my new book is out: “The Mountain Project”. What can I say––in a way I’m more pleased with this than with anything I’ve done before. The images are all (atypical for me) non-urban, black and white, and at some point during the project I started to ask myself why I even mess with color photography. After all, for the first four or five years of making photographs I did not use color at all, so this is sort of like going back to the roots. But then, it would not make much sense to photograph a traffic cone in black and white, nor would it make sense (to me) to photograph the Alps in color. Hence the choice was easy.

The Mountain Project is autobiographic in the sense that the European Alps are where I come from. And still, I’ve ignored the mountains for many years, and I did not know at all this particular region in the Dolomites, near the Venetian border, before I first went there in 2006. If I had a choice, I still would like to spend the last day of my life near the Greek archaeological site of Selinunte, Sicily. But the Dolomites come in as a close second. I hope the book gets across what kind of magical place this is; especially during winter, when you can walk for miles and miles in high altitude, in complete silence, with just snow, stone and sky around you.

For the technically inclined: The book includes 75 photographs on 120 pages. While this is a four color book, the images are printed from grayscale files. They come out slightly different compared to the four color C-prints – very slightly less luminous and a little more gritty, with darker shadows. The difference is miniscule though and––given the different purposes––makes sense to me. The format of the book is 7.5 x 7.5 inches.

If you want to make me happy (and yourself too I hope), you can get the book here (a movie including more or less the same images as the book is here). Enjoy!