TITLE: è viva

I took these photographs on the Mont Blanc massif, and they represent some fragments of some of its iconic mountains. I wanted to catch some particular and insignificant parts usually overlooked by the majestic photographs of mountain peaks we are used to see, and these parts are so particular that it is impossible to recognize which face they belong to. But they reveal new worlds, abstractions made of lights and shadows hitting the different surfaces, materials, shapes; a myriad of details create worlds that are unique and unrepeatable, because mountains are alive: they move, they change, their rock crumbles, it cracks, their ice melts and freezes, the water trickles of the melted snowfields creep into the blue ice. The title is indeed "è viva", "it's alive", that is the phrase me and my climbing partner always say every time we enter these wild and almost fantastic lands. We feel life pulsing around us, in that seeming heap of death we are not alone.

AUTHOR: Martina Ferrari (Italy)

I am a nineteen years old girl from north-west of Italy, currently studying Visual Arts at NABA in Milan. I started using photography when I was 9 and I asked as a Christmas gift a reflex camera. From that moment photography has always been an essential part of my life: this led me to the choice, after the scientific high school I attended, of embarking on a path of artistic studies.
I started my process with photography using only digital, but I am currently discovering and learning the analogue processes, which I am mostly interested in at the moment: I was born in the digital era and paradoxically that is probably the reason why I felt the need for a slow and not immediate process like the analogue one, I need time to slow down.
I am mostly caught by elements of the environment around me usually considered insignificant or ugly, and in general by the details of what is around me. My photographs rarely include human beings, or they appear anonimously as any other element of the environment.