JUST LIKE THAT THE TENSION BREAKS

She takes a cigarette, puts it in her mouth, but then reluctantly acknowledges the sign on the waiting room wall – Vietato Fumare. Above this sign, a timeless black and white photograph of a glacier seems to taunt both her, a smoker-in-waiting, and the chirpy white clock that constitutes another vital part of what she now slowly understands to be a carefully orchestrated wall-mounted assemblage. She tries to imagine a time when the clock or the photograph or the sign weren’t there. She can’t. She wonders if, photographed again now, that glacier would look any different? She in turn imagines the clock running glacially slow. Its 10.56 and the waiting room’s pew-like benches remain quite empty. She now notices a tiny white door in the wall framed between the benches’ blackness, it momentarily seems like her only way out – a portal.

Her legs are heavy, her wet boots heavier still. She turns and, as if suddenly startled by the realization that she is not alone, she comes face to face with a second assemblage – two landscape-eyes, a diagram-mouth and a nose marked only by an absence – a lazy decorator playfully exposed. She recognizes the right eye as the valley she crossed that morning. The left eye’s valley, framed as it is by two characteristic Val d’Aosta slate roofs, is yet to come. She thinks of the artist from just down that same valley who photographed himself in mirror-finish contact lens. She remembers her father’s climbing goggles adorning a plaster bust at home – more ‘shipyard worker’ than ‘intrepid mountaineer’ she used to think. Whose eyes are these? For there is surely an aesthete at work in this temporarily dislocated waiting room – the photographs’ corners are oddly rounded, the diagram lovingly framed. She knows compositional balance like this doesn’t just happen – it’s hard-won. The longer she stays here in the waiting room the less she feels inclined to move on – she is enthralled by its evocative precision – its concrete poetry.

Prompted by her aching limbs, her thoughts return to that peak, the exhilarating mountain-top climax of the previous day’s climb - a vertiginous interlude on her journey. She recalls the story of the speculative climber after whom her mountain is named. The most southernly peak of the Monte Rosa Massif, Pyramide Vincent (Vincent’s Pyramid) was, she’d been told, named after the climber Paul Vincent who in 1819 dreamed of finding high-mountain gold beneath its snowy peak. Yesterday, looking down from this very peak, the mountain’s shadow had reminded her of a photograph she once saw made from the tip of a man-made counterpart, the Great Pyramid in Egypt. Lee Miller’s 1937 exposure punctuating the movement of a vast stone sundial marking time day-in-day-out on the ancient town spread out below. Unlike Vincent’s p yramid, Miller’s did of course contain gold as archaeologist Harry Burton’s images meticulously attest. Inspired by Burton’s forensic cataloguing, our weary climber mentally numbers the objects that adorn the waiting room as if fearing her presence in this now-subterranean chamber might disturb their careful orchestration. In her minds eye, small white numbered cards are fixed beside each object – the clock 1, the glacier 2 and so on. That small white door seems suddenly to be more an entrance than an exit – concealing the hidden passageway down which she might have stumbled as she broke into this strange chamber. She fumbles for her own camera, itself a period piece. Two exposures remain on the roll – one for each wall. She cocks the shutter, already anticipating the juxtapositions a contact print of this well traveled film will produce – collapsing in a single 6 x 9 inch sheet the space between mountain top and valley floor while in turn looping upwards again via the alpine scenes hung so carefully on the walls around her. She turns from wall to wall, again cocks the shutter, again frames the scene in the viewfinder. The soft click of the shutter seems finally to release her. She takes up her bag, returns the unlit cigarette to her lips and moves out into the still-grey light of late morning.

Simon Starling