The Matterhorn, Mortality & Mozart.
The imagery in Switzerland — at least in the more popular destinations — is so good that it very quickly starts to feels like collecting postcards. That should be a good thing, but there was a moment, just after the sun had disappeared behind the Matterhorn, that I started to question the entire purpose of photography, or maybe all of life. My life, at least.
Immediately before the Ibex encounter, I was laying in bed at the highest hotel in Europe — 3100 Kulmhotel, perched right on the Gornergrat ridge with sweeping views of the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa and the Gorner Glacier, 10,170 feet above sea level. I was imagining that should I pass away in the middle of the night, it would be of no surprise. We had only landed there, with a family-of-four’s month abroad luggage, at 2p. By 3:30, we were off hiking. By evening, I didn’t think anything in my body would continue to work for much longer. I felt paralyzed, dehydrated, migrained and confined to the small realities of shallow breathing. Yet, something about this all happening at the top of the Earth, somewhere so extreme — it felt inevitable. Like how skeletons and the desert feels inevitable. In a place not meant for human life, surviving is the unexpected thing.
I glanced out the window of the hotel and saw that the last remaining light of the day was just touching the tips of the surrounding peaks. A force from somewhere deep inside offered me irrational strength and involuntary sense of purpose — I put my shoes on, grabbed my camera and hobbled outside to photograph a once-in-a-lifetime view that would escalate into something closer to peace, love and understanding than I had experienced before, in a natural way.
A day earlier, we were in the middle of the Lauterbrunnen Valley — a walk that inspired JRR Tolkien. Amidst the journey to see the only publicly available, glacier-fed waterfall in the world, I discovered an oft-photographed spot, looking down the valley, with an alpine church framed dramatically by cliffs, waterfalls and windy roads. I found myself drawn to shoot it, like everyone else, more out of a sense of photographic duty than artistic inspiration.
I’ve always thought of photogrpahy as my own expression of my own interpretation of my own experience. Real life interests me less than the stories I can invent in small windows of escape. And so I have mostly enjoyed the sense of discovery of finding an image of my own amongst the vast geography of our lives. This? This seemed borrowed more than discovered; everyone’s agreed-upon moment of bliss that you get to briefly experience. A small temporary gift for having made the journey. And there is a kind of peace in the collective breath of a space like this. There’s humility in it — capturing an image that needs no help. All things in place. Already the perfect song.
I clicked the shutter, not to create, but to remember I was here. That it was real. And I think whatever I felt was lost in the easiness of it, I somehow gained in my sense of luck at having gotten to it.
As if in understanding, Trümmelbach Falls, at the far end of our valley hike, delivered something far more emotional, if not for the lens, certainly for the senses . A display of the most basic of Earthly materials — stone and water — in such wild and thunderous delivery as to make most-presently alive the human inside the shell.
Still, when it stopped, it stopped. Very little stays on you once the water evaporates on the long hike back.
On the way back up from the valley floor, I stared out the window of the train. Compositions streamed by, but I had noted a small structure on the way down that I was able to prepare for on the way back. It felt a little bit more intentional, or maybe not unlike throwing a dart successfully into the inner red circle of a bull’s eye. For the next 24 hours, it was mostly like this — moments from train windows, if I could catch them.
Eventually, we made it to Austria. Yesterday, we saw the zoo. I was struck by the concentric circles of history. There was a 300-year old farm situated in the midst of the Vienna zoo, itself only a small part of the once-imperial ground. All of it perfectly manicured and with reverence to the more ornate parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire. An obvious chapter end before the 1930’s and 40’s. I watched a bear catch a fish behind glass.
I think most people who stick with photography have a long-journey relationship with it. It has its own ebb and flow. And the general tessitura of that relationship seems to find its highest and lowest notes with a certain self-reflective intellectualism at one end and a kind-of instinctual draw to create at the other. Most live in a continuous back-and-forth drive between those two points, discussing whichever point happens to be in the rear view mirror as their past.
I’m currently writing from a seat dangerously close to ten perfectly-angled Mille-feuille at Cafe Central in Vienna, Austria — far and away the most elegant city I’ve ever experienced. At the same time, a city can no longer move me the way nature can. And I blame much of that on my own instinct to question the reality of anything I’m experiencing anymore. Do I enjoy sitting in a time capsule cafe where Mozart himself once sat and pondered? Of course. But in the glass between me and so much pastry cream and bears, I see reflected a room of tourists and myself among them, drawn to the echo of genius and an out-of-reach brilliance — the lingering smoke of a candle long blown out.
I will pass through. The air of Vienna’s past will linger long after I’m gone. I’m drawn to photograph it, but in the way a zoo animal is drawn to fish, even though it could stop anytime and not go hungry.
Was it a week ago, now, or three hundred years? Circles. I remember we were in Switzerland, high above Zermatt, the valley had turned blue, but above it, light still clung to the Monte Rosa Massif, the sharp-edged ridges, Weisshorn and Matterhorn. I was feeling sick and mortal, for no other reason than for having risen too high, too fast. That was never a problem in my youth. My animal duty to document had brought me outside and I had forgotten to dress appropriately. Just one shot and I’ll crawl back in bed…
Then standing at the precipice, a group of Ibex arrived. No window, no pastry, no history or excess. Just four extraordinary legs and a birthright to live in the thinnest of airs, on the most vertical of terrain.
A lot of things disappeared in the moments that followed. The pain of travel left my body momentarily, I was not cold and my fever subsided. Also, the dread. Also, the pondering.
I pulled a deep breath into my lungs and felt enough time to compose at will. It was easy, at the end of hard. The Ibex lingered together at their brief summit, barely bothered by my presence as I climbed over a fence and sat by the edge of a steep cliff to better situate them against the Matterhorn. These beautiful animals from time, just 20 feet away. I stayed until dark — or Switzerland’s version of dark.
I am so used to the fleeting moments of photography. I’ve even learned to believe that in capturing them, I am performing some kind of important feat. But of all the things that disappeared up on that mountain, that was the biggest one. The goats would stay long past me.
History is so much bigger than us, but nature is even bigger than that. At the edge, it’s not points we see, but the circle. And sure, not everyone can compose like Mozart or Beethoven, but aren’t we lucky to be able to sit with the music and be alive in this time.
