This started as an Email but my Emailer was making a complete mess of the images so I moved it to a blog post. For all the images except this next, which is of Adam’s invite to his show, you can click on the images to see them full size if you have time and the interest!
But here is Adam’s invite, PDF file here if you want it. Rember the copyright is his here, not mine. My images are distributed under the licence I use for everything of mine here: the Creative Commons: CC BY-SA licence. I really recommend his work, I don’t know Will Brook but if he’s working with Adam I’m sure the work will be good.
So I recommend for anyone who can: see it! However, this blog post is an evolution from my attempt to send Adam some images from up here in my Alpine eyrie that I thought would appeal to him. I’ll leave it as a letter as that feels right. I started with this steal from his invite.
Loved the images Adam. Couldn’t resist grabbing that as a sort of appreciation. Sadly, barring some crisis, I’m 99% sure that I’ll be up here in the Alps.
I think you might like the juxtapositions we get to see up here.
That’s a sunset view from one side of the shared terrace outside our apartment. [For the blog version, click to see full size.]
This is the 2022 transhumance looking down yesterday from the other side of the terrace (Mont Blanc was in cloud in the far distance). The cows will move around our building for the next week or two being moved from one area of pretty verdant meadow to another and eating pretty much everything down to an inch high (and covering the place with their poo: almost as thickly as you can see there, those milking/watering points get much more densely covered than before the milking shed is moved to its next location.
When I took that, with a longish lens, I hadn’t seen the man with the backpack and the cow looking at each other either side of the electric fence. I think that’s your sort of moment. The juxtaposition with the end of a small beginners’ “button” also amuses me. [You have to click on this one to understand!]
And the machinery: this modern transhumance is a fascinating mix of centuries old and really quite modern!
They’ll eat most but not quite all the Rosebay Willowherb leaving just the odd stalk. (That’s back the other side of the terrace looking to left rather than right where where the sun sets over the top of a modern fast ski lift.) Top of a snow blower is poking into that scene in case you wondered what that was.
The summer season finished eight days ago now and immediately it does the tourists are replaced with a smaller number of technicians fixing and improving things.
That’s the first of four extension platforms being added to the last pylon support for the telecabine that joins our apartment building with Plagne Centre (whence I will leg it in a minute to get this week’s food shopping done in the little Spar shop there … the only shop unless you want to drop more the height of Snowdon into the valley).
On a rather sad final note: our local glacier (long lens and cropped to get in closer).
What’s sad about that is that it’s visibly shrinking yearly (though sadly I don’t have summer ‘photos of it from the past to show this). You can see massive rock slips onto the top of the glacier that give it a dark surface up there now that will absorbing the roasting sun up here rather than reflecting it. I’m not sure if the even more massive rock slips to the left of the glacier are new or not, we mostly know it to ski on in winter when everything up there will be snow covered, temporarily. The whole of the glacier is clearly sprinkled lightly with exposed rock and the foot of it, particularly to the left, is turning into terminal morraine. (There’s rather a nice great pillow of that: rock left by the trailing edge of the glacier, at the bottom. Who’d have thought that 1972 “O”-level geography would come back to me like this?!)
When will we face that our politicians and corporates, and though individually almost powerless, ourselves, are destroying the current state of our planet? Ouch. Go and see Adam’s work if you can: he balances concern with joy better than I do!