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Milo Keller

Awarded

Milo Keller

Photo research 'Alptransit'

Photography

Jury report

Visual pull into the mountain
In 'Alp­tran­sit' the pho­tog­ra­pher Milo Keller, trained at the Ecole can­tonale d'art in Lau­sanne, plumbs the depths of the tun­nel con­struc­tion issue. The photo se­ries shows the con­struc­tion work of the Alp­tran­sit. This work is a lot more than mere doc­u­men­ta­tion. It shows the great fas­ci­na­tion for the clash of the ar­chaic moun­tain with the most mod­ern high tech. Warm and cold colours are con­trasted so ef­fec­tively, it seems as if the pho­tog­ra­pher is stag­ing a light in­stal­la­tion in the man­ner of Amer­i­can light artist James Tur­rell. Many pho­tos seem dri­ven by a strong will to aes­theti­cise and ap­pear as ab­stract com­po­si­tions of coloured light. At the same time they ap­pear as over-sized still lives strangely de­tached from re­al­ity. Look­ing through the pho­tographs, which have been as­sem­bled in a book, a pow­er­ful pull that leads from the tun­nel por­tal into the in­side of the moun­tain is cre­ated. The ef­fec­tive dra­maturgy is rem­i­nis­cent of movie dra­maturgy. Usu­ally, he pho­tographs smaller ob­jects, says the pho­tog­ra­pher, but for once he be­came in­ter­ested in the huge di­men­sions of the tun­nels, silos and ma­chines. At first, he was com­pletely fas­ci­nated by the gi­gan­tism of the con­struc­tion of the longest train tun­nel world­wide: man against na­ture, ma­chine against rock. The will to over­come the tech­ni­cal traf­fic prob­lem as a kind of techno-ro­mance. In a sec­ond phase Milo Keller pho­tographed the min­ers and en­gi­neers. Im­mersed in flu­o­res­cent light they are shown in their un­der­ground recre­ation areas. 'Alp­tran­sit' skil­fully os­cil­lates be­tween doc­u­men­ta­tion and the sub­jec­tive eye of the pho­tog­ra­pher. Rarely has some­one cap­tured real con­struc­tion sites so de­press­ingly, have they dra­matur­gi­cally so skil­fully rhyth­mi­cised the pull into the moun­tain and or­ches­trated colours and com­po­si­tions so har­mo­niously.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Milo Keller
Born in
1979
Education
designer HES, communication visuelle, spécialisation photographie

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