As you may know, I’ve spent a considerable amount of my life in mountains. If not through guiding (which seems a lifetime ago now!), then spending time at my A Little Cabin in the Alps.

Even when I was working in Iraq, I loved being able to get out into the mountains of Kurdistan and, more latterly, flying over the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan in a small single-engined plane to visit some remote offices for the humanitarian organisation I was working with.

You get the drift! A couple of weeks ago, I was in my cabin in the mountains of north-west Italy, and although doing some housekeeping there, I was also spending quite some time just “re-connecting” with the mountains and nature at this time of the year.

I was also drawn to spending time thinking of the way we humans have settled - or tried to - in the mountains, particularly in the Cervo Valley.

Living in the mountains can sometimes sound idyllic (for those of us that don’t live there year round!) but a remote rural lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

What I wanted to try to portray through photos, was the magnitude and permanence of the mountains compared to the, often, temporary and fragile nature of human settlement and presence.

I recently came across a beautiful YouTube channel “All This Was Fields”.

If you like, you can play the track A Place in the Mountains whilst looking at the images (difficult to do on a mobile!) as the melancholy nature of of the music fits perfectly with the mood I was trying to portray!

(This track has been made freely available under the Creative Commons CC-BY licence.)

Self Contained

At the time I took many of the photos, the cloud was clinging to the mountains. The mist swirling through the trees. Light was low. Moody to the point of being sombre. To reflect this as well as the “mood” I felt at the time, I adopted the Fujifilm Classic Chrome simulation.

Overshadowed

Overgrown

Overlooked

Upwards

Isolated

With Potential

Occupied

I hope these images resonated with you. Thank you for taking the time to view.

If you liked this post and would like to read more (or listen to any new podcast), just drop your email address at the top of this page.

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In this episode 3 of PhotoStory, Des Clark talks with Kentucky born and raised, photographer, visual creator and businessman, Justin Thomas.

Justin describes his journey from developing rolls of film in his university darkroom to the camera world quickly becoming digital and leaving cash-poor students like him, side-lined essentially because of the cost of investing in fast-changing digital equipment. However when he moved into working in real-estate, he had both income to buy and an opportunity to develop, his photographic skills as a real-estate photographer.

Justin became known in his community as someone who “did” photography and, as a result, was asked to photograph weddings, family portraits and gradually built up his portfolio.

Justin and his family moved over to Liverpool, UK in 2020 in the middle of the Covid pandemic, to work alongside some people that were (and still are) running an international language school and community hub, both for international businesspeople as well as for refugees and asylum seekers. His time in the UK has allowed him to travel to Europe easily and relatively cheaply and it is during these travels that Justin has been able to expand his print portfolio.

PhotoStory is all about discovering, reflecting, and engaging by means of hearing the backstory of particular images that mightn’t otherwise be told. Justin describes the image Episode 3 of PhotoStory is featuring, where he was, what led up to it, the conditions the shot was taken and his success in finding the couple he was photographing to give them copies of his images.

LINK to Image: https://tinyurl.com/yc352vt8

Justin Thomas Photography:

justinthomasphotography.com

Welcome to the first episode podcast of Photostory where we will be discussing the backstory of particular images shot by photographers, sometimes including myself. So often we see an image which draws us in, but we know little about the context or what led up to that particular image being captured.

We look what was behind the image with the man holding a cigar behind his hands - the cover art for Photostory.

I mention Thomas Crauwels in the blog who records the fragility of the European Alps in black and white images.