All About Photo Presents 'Alpine Hiatus' by Filippo Poli

In Alpine Hiatus: The Snow No Longer Tastes Like Snow, Italian photographer and architect Filippo Poli turns his camera toward a landscape caught between memory and mutation. The project unfolds as both personal archaeology and ecological reflection — an inquiry into what remains when the snow, once a symbol of purity and permanence, becomes an artifact of artifice. Winner of the April 2026 All About Photo Solo Exhibition contest, Poli’s work traces the dissonance between remembrance and reality, offering a haunting meditation on disappearance.

The Alps have long existed in the European imagination as timeless — white, vast, and immutable. Poli dismantles that illusion. Through his lens, the mountains are no longer eternal peaks but wounded bodies. Artificial reservoirs, snow cannons, and fading glaciers replace the purity of childhood winters. The terrain that once inspired awe now speaks through fractures, revealing the physical and emotional exhaustion of a place stretched beyond its natural limits.

For Poli, this theme is not abstract. Alpine Hiatus emerges from his own return to Cervinia in Italy’s Aosta Valley — the site of formative childhood winters recorded in his family’s archives. Revisiting this landscape decades later, now with his son, he confronts a paradoxical inheritance: the sentimental geography of memory colliding with a present defined by absence. The snowfields of his youth appear only in black-and-white negatives, while today’s images show scars of modernization — concrete reservoirs and mechanical trails staging an imitation of winter.



“The mountain has changed its language,” Poli suggests through his imagery. Where once there was descent and joy, there is now intervention and strain. The juxtaposition of archival and contemporary photographs spans generations, yet it also exposes a fundamental rupture in perception. Snow becomes metaphor: for loss, for passage, for the fading coherence between nature and culture. Each layer of the series echoes both a personal elegy and a public warning.

Alpine Hiatus functions as more than documentation. It asks urgent questions about ecology, ethics, and belonging. What happens when progress erodes the very landscape it seeks to master? How can we inherit a territory that no longer resembles the one handed down to us? Poli treats these questions not with anger, but with quiet precision — using light, texture, and material contrast to render the collapse of continuity visible. His images are restrained, almost architectural in their composition, yet emotionally charged in their stillness.

There is mourning here, but also perseverance. The project refuses nostalgia’s comforts, instead inhabiting the fragile in-between — the hiatus itself — where beauty and damage coexist. In this space, Poli’s work becomes an act of care: to look closely, to hold attention when the subject resists purity, to document even as things dissolve. The snow no longer tastes like snow, but its image still carries weight, memory, and the possibility of poetic resistance.

With Alpine Hiatus, Filippo Poli offers not simply a record of environmental decline, but a vision attuned to the complexity of loss. His photographs remind us that looking can still be an ethical act — that to see, truly see, is to refuse indifference.



Filippo Poli
Filippo Poli, an architect by training, is based in Milan and has worked as a photographer since 2008 with architecture studios, foundations, and publishers.

His personal projects explore the cultural landscape and the evolving relationship between humans and nature, along with its consequences.

His work appears in leading international magazines and publications.

He received numerous accolades: 5th National New Photographic Vision León (2025), Enaire Foundation (2017, 2025), Architecture Photography Master Interior, PX3 Paris, ND Awards, Hopper Prize, Arles OFF (La Kabine), IPA Prize, Monochrome, FotoDoc, Arte Laguna, and PhotoEspaña Master Scholarship.

Exhibitions include a solo show in León (2025), Dispara Gallery (collective Quatro Amigos), PhotoEspaña (2017, 2025), Venice Biennale, Climate Summit (COP25, 2019), ARCO Madrid (2018), and Vila Casas Foundation.

His photographs are in public and private collections, including Enaire Foundation, Deutsches Architekturmuseum (Frankfurt), and Basho Gallery (USA).
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