Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2011, High Altitude | Photography in the mountains accompanies the Swiss Alt. +1000 festival of mountain photography, held in Rossinière in the foothills of the Alps. Rather than treating the mountain as a single, stable subject, the volume brings together contemporary photographic responses to its many conditions: spectacular and sublime, domesticated and constructed, even artificial or frightening. The mountain appears here not only as landscape, but as a cultural idea whose meanings are changing as populations recede and life is increasingly organised around urban experience.
The book places this contemporary work within a longer photographic history. Mountain ranges have attracted photographers since the nineteenth century and have helped shape Swiss identities; High Altitude asks what remains of those inherited myths, and whether the mountain can still function as an artistic source of inspiration. Its artists, many of them living far from mountainous environments, approach the subject without the reassuring grammar of the tourist postcard. Their differing perspectives register both the persistence of old imaginings and the instability of the landscape itself.
A major strand of the project concerns the tension between unspoiled nature and terrain altered by human presence. Olaf Otto Becker, invited to portray a natural park near the festival, contributes a body of work whose formal beauty is inseparable from an awareness of nature’s radical modification through climate change. His role is part of a broader, multi-photographer undertaking rather than the book’s sole authorship; curator and photography specialist Nathalie Herschdorfer shapes the volume’s exhibition-based framework.
For collectors, the book is valuable as a concise record of a significant curatorial proposition: a 2011 festival publication that connects the history of mountain photography with contemporary ecological and social questions. Its bilingual French/English presentation, 112 pages, 65 colour illustrations, and softcover-with-flaps format make it a focused, accessible object for studying how photographic books can reframe a familiar landscape as a contested cultural and environmental subject.
