Sublime photographs of vast winter landscapes featuring a choreography of snowcats beneath alpine night skies. Alongside them, workers shovelling snow, but also images of piles of snow being carted away. For some ten years now London-based photo artist Melanie Manchot has been exploring the tourist infrastructure of winter sports resorts. Following the invitation of the INN SITU series she spent several weeks in the Vorarlberg municipality of Gaschurn. The village is located at approx. 1,000 metres above sea level in the Silvretta Montafon ski area.
The photographs for this book illustrate the work done behind the scenes to create the ‘mountain experience’. Hidden skills, activities and routines that are needed to make the winter landscape accessible to guests in the first place. Melanie Manchot’s gaze is by no means investigative or critical of tourism. Her artistic position avoids any form of polemic, preferring instead to consider inquisitively and questioningly a contradictory phenomenon of our civilisation, namely our fascination for unspoilt natural environments and the technology needed to make them accessible to us. The taming of the untamed.

Melanie Manchot, *1966 in Witten, Germany. Lives and works in London, Great Britain.