Renowned for his gorgeous mountain scenes and spectacular photos of winter athletes, Peter Mathis has chosen black and white film to capture the essence of snow in this book. These stunning duotone images render a traditional Alpen landscape into painterly canvases that are in turns otherworldly, sensuous, haunting, and heavenly. Skiers’ tracks zig and zag through the powder and windswept waves of snow undulate like desert sand. Impeccably reproduced in large, full-bleed format, these images showcase an enormous palette, from the deepest black to the most immaculate white, and every imaginable tone in between. Mathis’ texts recall the instances of each shot, many of which require days of trekking through mountains with nearly fifty pounds of equipment strapped to his back. Reminiscent of the works of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, Mathis’s photographs perfectly evoke the biting cold, blazing sun, deep shadows, and blinding lights that make the Alps a uniquely beautiful landscape and snow a powerful force of nature.

Text by: Tom Dauer