in the valley of lanzo

Mountains are landscapes of negation. Environments, as the writer and poet Nan Shepherd understood so well, defined by absences and transparencies. Crevasses, hollows, clouds smothering stone – no air in between – and time lost in epoch-defying rock strata. Therefore one walks into the mountains, not up or over them, and becomes embodied by the landscape. Distance is disembodiment: I am the mountain and the mountain is me.

These photographs were composed during multiple hikes in the Valley of Lanzo, in the Italian Alps, during the summer of 2021. They can be read as meditations on the nothingness defining the mountainous landscape. An investigation of the sense of loss one experiences when confronted with the overwhelming grandeur of these terrestrial structures that seem to bear the universe on their angular shoulders. Deep time, gone with the distance.