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Renowned for his gorgeous mountain scenes and spectacular photos of
winter athletes, Peter Mathis has chosen black and white film to
capture the essence of snow in this book. These stunning duotone
images render a traditional Alpen landscape into painterly canvases
that are in turns otherworldly, sensuous, haunting, and heavenly.
Skiers' tracks zig and zag through the powder and windswept waves
of snow undulate like desert sand. Impeccably reproduced in large,
full-bleed format, these images showcase an enormous palette, from
the deepest black to the most immaculate white, and every
imaginable tone in between. Mathis' texts recall the instances of
each shot, many of which require days of trekking through mountains
with nearly fifty pounds of equipment strapped to his back.
Reminiscent of the works of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Mathis's
photographs perfectly evoke the biting cold, blazing sun, deep
shadows, and blinding lights that make the Alps a uniquely
beautiful landscape and snow a powerful force of nature.
As downhill skiing became popular in 20th-century Europe, resorts
in the Austrian, German, French, and Swiss Alps commissioned
paintings of their ski runs to turn into maps. The best of these
paintings are now featured in this book showing the artists'
ability to combine technical virtuosity, geographic information,
and creative flair. The undoubted master of panoramic map painting
is H. C. Berann, and many examples of his works are shown in this
beautiful volume, along with a select handful of artists from
throughout Europe. Detailing scenes of the Alpine range from
Slovenia to France, each of these images was created by hand from
aerial photography, mostly shot by the artists on helicopter rides
through the mountains. The paintings themselves cleverly combine
multiple perspectives so that all trails, terrain, and mountain
features are visible. In these exquisite reproductions, the
paintings have been stripped of all references to the ski trails,
allowing viewers to focus entirely on the beauty of the colours,
composition, and detail. A joy to study and savour, these dramatic
and vivid paintings recall a time when the human hand was the best
means of translating the Alps' towering beauty to the general
public.
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