Steve Luxembourg

Photographic Series \ 2020

to MONT NOIR

How do we imagine the black mountain? Is it a burden that weighs us down or can we climb it, overcome it? The fictive MONT NOIR itself is not shown in any photograph, and yet the series unites impressions in its multi-layered approaches, the moods that prevail around it and the stories that are inherent in it. With charcoal drawings on Bible pages, I approach the metaphors and symbolism: the mountain raises and lowers, is moved, serves as a border, disintegrates. Stones of the Devil's Hill, prepared with charcoal and salt, become imaginary mountains, with black precipices, cracks, and snow-covered tops. Disused clay industry zones in the pottery town of Kandern and potash works in the countryside around Hanover are the settings of my analog black-and-white photographs. Particularly present are the traces of potash mining: Heaps, more than a hundred meters high, with salt crusts, like the first snow on the steep, dark slopes. In their artificiality they become the archetype of the mountain.