Grandeur nature

Panoramas and mountain landscapes.

Summits, valleys, lakes. Whole landscapes, held at a distance, with no foreground. Sometimes a person, or something people have built, gives the scale: that is the grandeur of nature. Stitched together from dozens of images, the photographs run past a metre wide. You step back to take in the whole, then move closer to go hunting for detail. A vastness you can get lost in, like a "Where's Waldo?".

It all began on hikes. I loved spotting, from one summit, another summit I had climbed a little while before. As a child I got lost on the ferry taking us to Corsica; ever since, I have been passionate about maps, and every summit made my mental map a little bigger. I climbed with a zoom lens and a tripod, sometimes on top of my bivouac and climbing gear, and cut the landscape into dozens, sometimes hundreds of images, which I stitched together back home.

During my studies I had discovered Andreas Gursky and his taste for the colossal. That "wow" effect won me over at once: I wanted that. Panoramas gave it to me. My camera produced images 40 cm wide; stitched together, they reach a metre and a half without losing any sharpness.

There was also something compulsive about it. I always needed more summits, and little by little I only went up to tick boxes on a list. I had become a consumer of the mountains. Looking back, everything that would follow was already there: the tiles, the zoom, the back and forth between the whole view and the detail.