In the Swiss Alps, the water that gives a landscape its apparent remoteness also supplies an extensive industrial system. Hydroelectric Sublime follows this relationship in the Emosson region of Valais, where a dam complex connects to the Nant de Drance power plant, housed in a cavern some six hundred metres underground. Over three years, Beatrice Gorelli and Keiichi Kitayama explored how engineering, terrain and the people who depend on them occupy the same place. Their photographs are credited to their collaboration, Les Hadrons.
The movement between mountain views, tunnels and machinery is essential to the project. Looking at the surface alone would leave much of this landscape’s function invisible. Entering the infrastructure changes the meaning of the views outside: water becomes both an element in a picture and a resource being directed through a system. Essays, interviews and local histories widen that movement beyond the photographers’ own encounter, bringing the valley’s inhabitants into a subject easily dominated by the scale of its structures.
Gorelli’s background in visual communication and media design meets Kitayama’s transition from fashion and portrait work toward environmental subjects. Both edit the book, and Gorelli designs it, with contributions by Takako Itoh and Nicolas Nova. The 2024 Lars Müller edition brings 162 illustrations into a 176-page, English-and-Japanese hardback. Its combination of images and different forms of writing makes room for technical and lived knowledge alongside the visual force of the Alpine setting.
For a collection concerned with landscape and environmental photography, the book offers a way to examine the infrastructure embedded in scenery. Its interest lies in the changing position of the viewer: distant observer, visitor inside an installation, and reader of experiences rooted in the valley. The question of whether these interventions appear magnificent or severe remains open. The volume was a finalist in the Traditional category of the 2024 Lucie Photo Book Prize.
