I am Anne Bergman, a photographer and visual artist who works in the field of Art and Research. In 2020 I received my Bachelor of Arts in Photography at School of Fine Art and Design|St. Joost. With longterm project I focus on our relationship with nature and on the role of the medium Photography in our society. Was does the landscape mean to us? To what height to we glorify nature with our cameras?  With found-footage, documentary and fictional work I research not only the subject but also the possibilities and limitations of photography as a medium.  Observations and theoretical research are at the core of my projects, which results in a paradox between the subjective and objective. The outcome of my projects is mostly printed, however I am not scared of creating spatial objects with my photographs. Since I was a little kid I came to the Swiss Alps every summer. We went camping, did hikes and we slept in mountain cabins. With the years I started to feel more and more at home at those heights. They overwhelmed me, even scared me sometimes. As I grew older I started to bring my camera up in the mountains. But when I was back home and looked at the pictures I took of those amazing places. They were just flat images, still beautiful, without the emotions I experienced while I took them. From then I started to doubt myself as a photographer. But also the power of photography, was it dead as many people dare to say? Was it me, not being experienced enough to capture that sublime feeling in an image? Or was it the Sublime itself that didn’t allow us humans to capture her. I started a visual research on how our perception of the mountain landscape had changed through innovations in photography. And with this, our affinity to the mountains itself. The research is on how humans changed the perception of the sublime mountain landscape through photography. Once was the mountain a sacred and sublime place, now mankind and the traces it has left behind are inerasable. How did it come to this? What role did photography play in this change? What is in store for the future? Will mankind be able to recreate the mountain’s sublimity, or do the mountains reclaim what we took from them? The project resulted in a paradoxical narrative between emotions and theoretical research which came together in a photobook and an essay. I will also share a few parts of the essay with you, while it is an important part of the project. Essay: "Our modern-day society would be unimaginable without images (of landscapes). We make paintings, take photographs, and even let our computers generate images. Considering all this, we as humans are incredibly rich. But can a modern-day photographer still capture the Sublime? Even more important, does the Sublime still exist?  (...)From its earliest hours, mountain photography was an artistic and aesthetic battle which found itself on the border of science and art. Photography as a medium developed at a rapid pace, while at the same time the curious researchers turned into photographers and mountaineers. The mountain became a part of, and symbol for identity. Furthermore, through the urbanization and industrialization of society, the mountain gained a political character.  (...) However, if we talk about Kant’s description of the Sublime, the description I adopt, I do not believe that fear and awe are emotions I find in landscape photography. I can empathize with what the photographer felt when the photo was taken. Thus, with that the photo becomes an image and registration of the moment when its creator felt the depicted sublimity. This has largely to do with our current network society, in which images are everywhere and we have become saturated with them. Susan Sontag wrote a passage in her well-known book ‘On Photography’ (1973) about photography and the sense of in the images, just as what Sublime images would do to us. “Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately, the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of such images of horror. One’s first encounter with the photographic inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically modern revelation: a negative epiphany.” Nowadays images rarely show us something new or original, while in the seventies people were exposed to an ever increasing number of new imagery. It would be compelling to hear what Susan has to say about today’s never-ending supply of images. (...) The Sublime landscape and the experience it evokes, is a complicated subject in our modern-day society. It is something ambiguous because it is something on its own, but at the same time a representation full of symbolism and history. The photographer, writer, and tourist all approach this concept from a different angle. We humans have formed a parameter around everything in our vicinity. Nature has become a characteristic of culture, an interpretation of itself, something that floats between reality and imagination. If our image of the landscape is something cultural, then so is our interpretation of it. The depiction of the landscape forms the way we look at nature. Before we start to build a mountain, we have to learn and understand that every image is of equal importance. " You can find the complete essay 'How to Build a Mountain' on my website. www.annebergman.nl/essay