There are moments before a landscape when I feel as though the whole Earth is rising before my eyes. Mountains that seem never-ending, skies opening over an immensity that is difficult to comprehend. And there I am—small, absolutely small—feeling privileged to witness something extraordinary.
I like to walk until I feel the fatigue in my legs. To stop, look into the distance and let the wind strike my face. To feel that emotion which sometimes arrives without warning and makes my skin prickle. There is enormous happiness in those moments. An almost childlike happiness, the kind that makes us forget our age, our worries and everything we left behind to reach that place.
Over the years I have understood that this is my true relationship with photography. The camera comes afterwards. First there is wonder: the need to stay a little longer, to keep looking even when I think I have seen everything. Because something I had not discovered always appears—a light, a shape, a distance that suddenly seems infinite.
And then I try to make a photograph, knowing that no image can truly contain what I am feeling. That part of the experience will remain forever in that place, among those mountains, beneath that sky.
But I keep trying.
Because I would like someone, on looking at one of my photographs, to feel for an instant what I felt. To forget everything, to marvel again like a child, to understand how extraordinary it is simply to be here, in this world.
Before certain mountains, I have felt that an entire lifetime is not enough for so much beauty. And even so, what immense good fortune to have been born in time to behold them.
And I return to those words I wrote so many years ago, because I still believe exactly the same thing:
“Let yourself be carried away, look into the distance, play with every element the landscape offers us, be moved, be amazed... feel the hairs stand on end when we are there, want to continue, enjoy the fatigue... that ‘pleasant feeling of tiredness’, feel that little by little we are merging with the landscape we inhabit, shake everything off, be ourselves, delight like children... only then might we have some chance of conveying emotion through our images.”
GVIVANCO