White Mounts

January 2025. Southern Alps. A weekend with a group of friends, in a resort I didn't know. I had the Rollei 35 and a roll of Portra 400. The idea wasn't to make a series, just to have the film on me if something presented itself.

Portra 400 is normally used for portraits, for the way it renders skin tones with softness. On the white snow of the Alps in January, it does something different: it turns pure white into a material, gives it an almost edible consistency. Icing sugar. That's where the title came from, looking at the first prints.

L'Insolence is the photograph I wouldn't have made if I'd been looking for it. A friend stopped on a ridge, lit a cigarette, was looking at the slopes below. I had ten seconds, maybe less. The portrait format imposed itself: the verticality of the posture, the white sky behind, and this absolute calm in the middle of a packed ski resort.

L'Apparition arrived around 4pm, when the low light was making the moon appear above the peaks before the sun had even set. It's the kind of image you never see in ski photography, because you're usually inside by then. La Muraille is the only skier on a wide run, seen from the cable car: a tiny figure on a disproportionate white expanse.