Philippe Fragnière (1987) entered in 2008 the ECAL where he obtained his Bachelor Degree in Photography in 2012. For his graduation work, he returned to the snowparks of his adolescence with an artistic approach.

The photographer has visited these sporting events and highlighted the aesthetic relationship between these facilities and the Alpine landscape in the manner of certain land art installations.

Constructed as ski terrains for freestyle competitions, snowparks form monumental snow architectures erected as takeoff platforms for riders. Appropriating elements of the urban environment or citing architectural archetypes, these ephemeral structures insert the built environment of the city into the Alpine landscape. This confluence of the urban and Alpine contexts prompted the artist’s initial investigation into freestyle culture. The project then evolved into a wider reflection on the proximity of these snowparks with artistic practices such as sculpture and Land art.

The snowpark series parallels both these concerns through its combination of two types of photographic documents: sharp documentary photographs of decontextualized urban elements and pristine, almost abstract, landscapes which reveal these constructions’ formal qualities while questioning the nature of the photographic document itself.

Extending the artist’s research, the book presents the snowpark photographs as one continuous landscape, yet constantly in the process of being assembled and rearranged. Either cropped into geometric volumes by the pages’ folds or emerging as futuristic panoramas through their unfolding, the snowparks are merged with their settings to construct an endlessly reconfigurable landscape blurring disinctions between the built and the natural environment. By acknowledging the dialogue between these environments and aestheticizing its elements, Snowpark forges new perceptions of the contemporary Alpine landscape.

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Philippe Fragnière (1987) is a Swiss photographer. Born and raised in the Swiss Alps, he attended the Ecole Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne (ECAL). Mainly working as a still life photographer on editorial and commercial projects, Philippe Fragnière keeps his own artistic practice in a more documentary approach.
Philippe Fragnière is also an invited lecturer at ECAL.
He works in Paris and London.