Mountain Line “Everest“

Cities have been my main field of creation for my work but though this, I have always been interested in the relationship between nature and cities especially, a river.

Many major cities have river as it exist even earlier than the composition of cities and river have brought culture and materials too. So, about 4-5 years ago, I have been observing the nature within the cities.

Mt Everest has always been my interests too as it is such a symbolic and important mountain for literature and films too. Which I have been always fascinated by that. There are also lots of pilgrimage maps from the ancient times for famous mountains such as Mt Fuji. So, after created my recent work which theme is river, called ” Il PO”, I decided to visit Nepal in last May until June.

Walking and movement is my major interests and I have been tried to visualize the physical activities through Photography, So, for Mt Everest, capturing symbolic and classical scenery for this mountain is not my interest and I was more interested in the road itself and how walkers are walking as well as the life of local people and Sherpa people live together with the mountain.

For this piece of Mt Everest, I walked the Everest Highway spending 23 days. I started from Lucla which located in 2860 high point, to the base camp of Mt Everest as well as near by mountains up to 6000m high point. From there, I walked to Gokyo Peak passing through Cho-La Pass where I often walked away from the trails to find the shooting point. Then I finished shooting at the location which is 1000M down from Lucla. I carried 300-400 rolls of films in my backpack and it was one of the most tough shooting for my works.