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Background information
"Over a period of six years, Michael LANGE made extensive travels to various regions of the French Alps (Mercantour, Ecrin, Serre-Chevalier, Valloire, Val Cenis, Vanoise and others) in search of silence and solitude. High up in the mountains a collection of impressive meditative images was created, between light and dark, silence and storm. He followed the idea that also and especially in landscape photography, there is the decisive, only right moment, the moment of perfect harmony between nature, landscape and the photographer. He often had to wait for days, sometimes weeks, high up in the mountains. Constantly accompanied by changes in weather and light, rain and snow showers, suddenly shining sunlight and mountains covered in fog, he was always in search of that moment. The title, 'Cold Moutain', refers to the legendary Zen monk, poet and hermit Hanshan ('Cold Mountain') from 7th century China. The selection of poems reflecting the solitude of the mountains and human soul states is taken from four famous Zen hermits - Hanshan, Ikkyu, Basho and Ryokan - from the 7th, 15th, 17th and 18th centuries in China and Japan. In the sequence of the book, the poems are the connecting element between the groups of pictures. They set the tone and determine the atmosphere of the book and the pictures and reflect the author's long relationship to Zen Buddhism, which has had a major influence on his landscape photography.
Content
The fifty-two images in Michael LANGE's book of photographs 'Cold Mountain' combine the quiet majesty of mountain landscapes with fleeting moments of the perception of nature. The photographer was concerned with the question of how we perceive what we see and how we can find new ways to express our feelings in pictures. (slightly modified publisher's text, © Hartmann Projects, 2020)