Cable car stations, ski slopes and panoramic terraces: the Alps as a playground for winter sports aficionados and enthusiastic mountaineers. A populated Alpine recreation park. In his tableaux, Italian photographer Walter Niedermayr documents the effects of tourism on the mountain environment.
His images of ‘scarred’ landscapes, though, are by no means pure photographic representations of reality: his work is subtle, with minimal changes in angle and point of view, making use of barely perceptible alterations in order to combine individual images into disturbing photographic arrangements.
At the same time, Niedermayr’s artistic and photographic eye captures the traces of the Alpine leisure industry as aesthetic signs and lines in the landscape. There is a tension in these photographs, an ambivalence that emerges from the beauty of the composition and the awareness of the environment’s vulnerability.
Rare first and only edition, selected by Parr and Badger in their Photobook vol. 2
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