MATTERHORN

About the book MATTERHORN

“THERE are some images that can only be captured by someone with a personal, and borderline spiritual, understanding of a location. Swiss photographer Nenad Saljic’s new book contains perhaps one of the best recent examples of this. Within its pages there are a variety of ‘portraits’ of a single location: Switzerland’s famous (and at times infamous) Alpine mountain, the Matterhorn. Nenad trained as a mountaineer and caver in his youth, and it was these experiences that caused him to fall deeply in love with, as he terms it, ‘nature’s most ancient textures, forms and shapes’. In this volume we find a visual document of Nenad’s love affair with the Matterhorn. Each image shows the vast formation under a variety of weather conditions – mist, storm, sun and rain. A pure overwhelming beauty suffuses every image. Matterhorn is an incredible and perfect encapsulation of the sublime.” ★★★★★
By Oliver Atwell, July 18, 2015

Don’t be misled by the prosaic title of this book. The Matterhorn is hardly “just a mountain.” Straddling the border between Switzerland and Italy, the Matterhorn may not be the world’s tallest pinnacle, but it’s arguably the most dramatic, its almost perfect pyramidal shape offering four distinct faces to the world. The British art critic John Ruskin called it “the most noble cliff in Europe.”
Nearly as awe-inspiring are the images that Croatian photographer Nenad Saljic has made of the Hornli Ridge, which connects the East and North faces of this fabled peak. A mountaineer in his youth, Saljic utilized time exposures to capture the sweeping movement of clouds and the streaking paths of stars in images of infinite variety and fascination. His photographs graphically invoke the Matterhorn’s mystique and majesty, as well as its menace—some 500 climbers have died trying to summit it—while seemingly evoking its past, present and future.
By Dean Brierly