Aline Diépois

In the valleys, from the high summits that surround Zermatt, the gigantic movement of the glacier is frozen, like an irreversible snapshot. Here, the seasons pass one after the other, but have no power over a history that has fallen to pieces. The rare human silhouettes and color are incorporated into this immobile flux like annexes to the autarkic oxygen of Zermatt as a place. The imprint of plants appears to be mineral and gigantic, the summits and perspectives are turned upside down, the immobility of stone and ice resembles a fossilized tumult, a flow of ages. The almost total effacing of intention in these photographs lets other things appear as if by imposition in the glacial mist or the pastel intoxicated by altitude—a form of nature in which texture and matter take on the aspect of puzzles, fractals, the interweaving of crystals and of gypsum. These ups and downs of mute logic and unthought-of mirror-games have laid down their principles for the composition of a book, reinforcing this choice by using over-aged rolls of film whose texture, matured by the coldness of wintry mountains, has worked alone, with its specifically intimate process. Since the image has been captured in this form of withdrawal, its pictorial force comes across as a natural element—a contemplated, integral secret.