Balthasar Burkhard
Until February 8; Fruitmarket Gallery

There’s always a danger in this job of reading too much into a picture. One day I will wax lyrical about some profound message in an artist’s work, only to be told I’m talking nonsense. Let’s call it the gush trap. The advantage is that if it sounds good enough, most artists are inclined to nod their heads sagely as if they’d thought of it first.

Balthasar Burkhard, the 60-year old Swiss photographer currently on show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, tends to talk straightforwardly of his work as doing nothing more (or less) than capturing the essence of the landscapes in front of his lens. If these were simple, uncomplicated landscapes, I’d say they were pretty dark and uninteresting. But at the risk of falling into the gush trap, I get something else out of them.

Burkhard has traveled Alpine mountain ranges and forests by helicopter to make these huge black and white photographs, taken from the air and from remote groundlevel viewpoints. They are dark and grainy, and shadows seem to be his preoccupation rather than the silky white light one would normally expect in romantic images of ice-floes and cloud-filled skies. In fact Burkhard appears to have eschewed the naturally brilliant beauty of the snow-blanketed mountains and gnarled woodlands for some other kind of truth.

His ominous sky photographs are alarmingly dull and foreboding, but each in its own way seems to suggest an escape route. There are hints of light creeping through here and there, or swirls of cloud which look like some entrance to a worm-hole.

Burkhard, who previously photographed cities from the sky, strives here to create a sense of isolation, where there is no sign of humankind in these vast, overwhelming terrains. That message comes through loud and clear, particularly if, like me, you went to see Touching the Void (that film about the climbers stuck on a glacier) the night before.

But the thing that really gets under your skin about these images is their weird multiple viewpoints. Presumably because of his distant vantagepoint, foreground and background are unified into one singular plane, making far away trees as focussed and clear as the branches right up front. You feel like you are looking down at the snow and up at the mountains at the same time, and safe inside an ice-cave but also somehow simultaneously on the exposed ridge to its right. Your peripheral vision seems to have taken on a life of its own. In short, you feel omniscient like God.

This, to me, is a complete inversion of the sublime – that Romantic preoccupation where man is a tiny dot overwhelmed by the beautiful horror of nature. Now, somehow, the viewer has the upper hand. The landscape itself is reduced to an object around which we can travel with our all-seeing eyes, up and down, left and right, near and far all at once.

It is a strange, private feeling which can only be experienced in situ, with photos at this grand scale. The images are generously spaced out, and they need to be, because floating through the landscapes is a sort of lone act of meditation. So take your time – and your winter woollies – for a transcendental trip through those snowy mountains.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.01.04