Gezicht op de Jungfrau 1897 - 1924

This photograph of the Jungfrau was made by the Wehrli brothers at some point in their career as a photographic firm. It's a landscape, sure, but what kind of landscape is it? The tonal range in this image is so compressed, it’s almost like a drawing in charcoal. The way the light falls on the mountain, carving out planes and textures, is so suggestive, almost abstract. It's like, what is the essence of a mountain? Is it its physical mass, its height, or is it the way it shapes our perception? Look at the peak, right up top. The texture is so tangible, so rough, it’s as if you could touch it, as if they were sculpting the mountain out of light itself, trying to create some kind of conversation between light and form. I think that's what art does, it takes something familiar, something concrete, like a mountain, and turns it into something else entirely, something that lives in the realm of feeling. Like the American photographer, Alfred Stieglitz, who turned clouds into emotional landscapes. We are all connected to nature, but art helps us reimagine it.