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.