Something has stayed with me through many years of photographing landscapes. It is a feeling that is difficult to explain, one that appears when I stand before a mountain, a glacier or an immense field of ice and understand that, however long I look, I am seeing only a small part of what is happening there.
A mountain may have spent millions of years rising from the earth, yet a few seconds are enough for it to disappear behind a cloud. An iceberg may seem impossible to move, but it is changing even as I photograph it. The wind carries the snow, the light reveals a fissure, shadows advance across the rock. Everything is happening before us, although we rarely manage to perceive it.
I am struck by that thought. By how many things had to happen for a landscape to appear before our eyes in precisely that way. And by how briefly that coincidence will last.
Conditions of Appearance, the photography book I am working on and my next publication, grew from that concern.
The project brings together images made between 2018 and 2023, mainly in Antarctica and the southern regions of Chile and Argentina. Many of them were part of series I submitted to international photography competitions. They were conceived at different times and under different circumstances, but when I looked at them together again, I discovered something I had not seen so clearly before.
The same question lay behind all of them.
What are we really seeing when we look at a landscape?
For a long time I was drawn to the immensity of mountains, the force of glaciers and the sometimes brutal beauty of nature when it presents itself without the slightest regard for our presence. All of that still moves me. But over the years I have begun to pay attention to other things: fractures in the ice, layers holding thousands of years of pressure, a summit barely emerging between the clouds. Those moments when the physical world seems to stand exactly at the limit between enduring and disappearing.
In Antarctica, sailing among enormous masses of ice, that feeling took on a scale I still find difficult to describe. There were structures that seemed built by an impossible architecture, walls crossed by blue veins, blocks leaning over the sea, mountains suddenly rising from the darkness. Everything possessed extraordinary force, but also a disconcerting fragility.
At times, as I watched those forms, I thought I was looking at time from within.
Because ice is also that: time accumulated, compressed and deformed by forces that began acting long before we arrived. A history written without words, in which every fracture and every fold belongs to something that is still happening.
The book is organised into several series that explore these relationships between the physical world, light, atmosphere and time. It is not intended as a journey through extraordinary places or a collection of my most spectacular photographs. What interests me is something far more difficult: trying to show what usually lies hidden behind the beauty of the landscape.
I have always believed that photography holds something extraordinary: it allows us to capture an instant that will never be repeated. A unique convergence of light, form, movement and our own presence before them.
The mountain will still be there after we have gone. The ice will continue to move, the clouds will change shape and the light will fall once again on those same walls. But never in exactly the same way.
That is precisely what moves me about making photographs. Knowing that, amid millions of years of history and change, there was one second when everything came together before my eyes and I was able to preserve it in an image.
Sometimes that instant reveals the immensity of a mountain. At other times it is barely enough to disclose a summit among the clouds, a fissure lit within the ice or a form beginning to vanish into the mist. I have learned to find as much beauty in what is revealed as in what remains hidden.
Conditions of Appearance tries to bring together this way of looking, formed gradually over the years. It is still a work in progress, and probably one of the most personal projects I have undertaken, even though its pages say very little about me.
As I looked through these photographs again, I felt something that often comes over me before great mountains: the strange impression of witnessing an event that began long before we existed and will continue when there is no one left to observe it.
I think of those immense walls of ice, of summits appearing between clouds, of forces working silently beneath surfaces that seem motionless.
And I think that, for an instant, I had the privilege of being there.
Before a world that did not need to be seen in order to continue existing.
GVIVANCO