Rene Pfluger
I have been photographing since childhood — the mountains were always there, first as a mountaineer and skier, later as a photographer trying to hold what he has been seeing for sixty years. Training as a structural designer shaped my eye early: for proportions, for the relationship between surface and space, for what carries an image and holds it together.
The Alps are my terrain. Not as a picture-postcard subject, but as a place where silence and light have a physical quality — where the seasons shape the mood, the morning glow traces the ridge differently than evening light, and where alpine dairymen, mountain guides, and mountain farmers live a culture older than photography itself.
When a dairy woman works an alpine farm that has stood since the early nineteenth century, that is not a motif — it is a moment I want to preserve: as image, as atmosphere, as light.
I work with historical large-format lenses and a bellows camera — lenses that lend mountains and clouds a silken luminance, directing sharpness to where landscape becomes memory. The result: gigapixel originals in which every wisp of mist, every layer of rock remains visible. Printed on hand-made Japanese Washi paper — light refracts in the surface and lets the image float.
Each subject exists three times — plus one Artist Proof. No more.