Book series turns its lens on the beauty of B.C.
Norwegian photographer helps Louis Vuitton turn its Fashion Eye series to B.C.
When the team at Louis Vuitton approached photographer Solve Sundsbo to shoot the latest edition of the Fashion Eye photo-book series, he wasn’t sure how enthusiastically his initial destination suggestion would be received.
The series highlights exotic and aspirational global locales meant to visually excite and inspire those who leaf through each hardcover edition’s glossy, full-colour pages. And, for the 10th release, Norwegian-born, London-based Sundsbo wanted to capture a place that has captivated him so thoroughly, he has returned to explore it more than a dozen times.
He wanted to capture B.C.
“It had to be a comprehensive bit of images from one space, so, that could have been London or Norway. But they both would have been a bit obvious,” Sundsbo explained of the decision. “But then, I thought, I go every year to British Columbia and I always take pictures, so it made sense to suggest that.”
Monte Carlo, Morocco and Miami are a few of the hot spots notable photographers, including Helmut Newton, Vincent Van De Wijngaard and Guy Bourdin, have turned their lenses toward for the French fashion maison’s visual series, exposing a deeply personal perspective of each destination that tells a side of the city or country that has rarely been seen before.
So, to say Sundsbo was skeptical about receiving a unanimous “oui” on his slightly unconventional Pacific Northwest destination, specifically highlighting the Selkirk mountain range, would have been an understatement.
“I thought, they’re never, ever going to like this — because it’s so odd,” he recalled with a laugh. “It’s not that British Columbia is odd, but it’s not like, Jaipur or SaintTropez ... (But) this is where I like to go.”
Much to Sundsbo’s surprise, the Vuitton team felt his suggestion fit just right.
“They said this is brilliant, it’s perfect,” he said with a hint of residual amazement.
Two years after pitching the angle, Fashion Eye — British Columbia is the result.
A quick leaf through the bluebound book yields a glimpse of arresting images that are more otherworldly than one might expect: one snapshot highlights snowdrifts clinging to what appears to be a rock face, another highlights a ghostly image of the sun viewed through a frigid, snowblurred sky. But, while the book’s cover and contents assure readers they’re viewing snapshots of the mountains somewhere in B.C., it’s easy to believe these are actually images of the terrain of some faroff planet — or even the moon.
Basically, it’s easy to believe they’re from anywhere but here.
“I think a lot of people think of it as a slightly otherworldly experience … or an otherworldly sensation,” he agreed of the snapshots bound within the book. “It feels like a place where we’re not to be. And, that’s right, because we’re not meant to be in these places at all. We’re not meant to stand 3,000 metres above sea level, on the 21st of January in minus-10 degrees in gale winds. You’re not meant to be there. Because, if you stand there for very long, you die.”
Throughout the book, Sundsbo plays with editing elements, including colour and light, as well as dramatic ranges in scale, to carefully create the unsettling, almost disorienting perspective conveyed by the images.
“What’s good about the book, in a way, is that I can’t capture all of British Columbia — except from a satellite photograph. So, what this is, is trying to open a door or a window into a little bit of what my experience is of British Columbia,” he explains. “I’m trying to collect what is beautiful about that place, but in a way that isolates it from the general environment and focuses in on a very narrow aspect. In that way, it’s much more like poetry than a short story or even a novel. It might even be more of a haiku than a poem. And sometimes, even maybe less than that. Sometimes, it may just be a word.”
He hopes the unique perspective can inspire others to see something strange and beautiful in even the smallest detail of their own surroundings.
“If I can open up that window to you, as a viewer, and you go out and the next time you’re out in the mountains, and you see something, and you look at it in a way that you hadn’t looked at it before you looked at the book, then I’m the happiest man in the world,” he said.
But, if the images serve to convey some type of concrete message to viewers, that’s merely by coincidence. Sundsbo, who has worked with brands such as Chanel, Cartier and Gucci, said he set out simply to capture the beautiful countryside, from his own perspective, rather than trying to convey some type of dedicated, branded message.
“The pictures weren’t made to be in a book, which I think gives them a freedom and a quality. They were made solely for my own discretion and pleasure, at that moment,” he said. “It wasn’t like, I have to communicate this or that, because normally, when you communicate, there is a message.
“But, the message was nothing except for what I wanted to do, there and then — at that moment. It was very instinctive and very free.”
Sundsbo said it was the total freedom afforded to him by the Louis Vuitton Edition team that served to make the latest book so arresting.
“That’s where the strength of it comes from,” he said.
“And I think that kind of noncommission, no need to communicate anything made the book as beautiful as it is.”
To capture the images in the book, Sundsbo was armed with nothing more than a small camera he kept stored in the breast pocket of his ski jacket. He didn’t scout the locations, didn’t have an entourage of camera assistants and was often afforded only a few minutes by an accompanying ski guide to capture each shot.
“If you see something, you just go bam, and you’ve got a photo of it,” he recalled.
“It’s not like standing and composing with a tripod and playing with exposure. It’s all very instinctual, really quick, from the head.”
In addition to spontaneity, the other element Sundsbo said made the photos so surreal was the one thing many British Columbians bemoan the most: the weather.
“I love the greyness and I love the rain,” he said.
“Photographers love weather ... because it gives a certain emotion.”
And, in B.C., as Sundsbo put it, “there’s a lot of weather.”
The notoriously mercurial shifts in clime not only appealed to the photographer’s interests, and reminded him of his home country of Norway, it also served to appease his more “romantic” side.
“I’m an incurable romantic, not in a flowers-across-the-table way, but more of a Beethoven, standing-on-a-mountaintop-ina-storm kind of way,” he said with a laugh.
“My wife always says, ‘Oh, here he goes again.’ It’s raining outside and we’re on holiday and I’m like, ‘I’m loving the weather!’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, God.’”
It’s perhaps this overall affection for and appreciation of B.C. that prompted the Louis Vuitton team to give Sundsbo the go-ahead in the first place, knowing the images would turn out better, more intriguing than if he had been asked to go shoot images of a place he felt no connection to.
“Because then you take away that instinctual love for the place,” he said of an alternate reality where he would have been sent out on assignment to a more typical exotic locale. “And then, it just becomes a job.”