Since the discovery of her family’s archive in 2024, Nina has spent the last few years exploring how to weave together her own interpretations of the mountains she calls home with those of her fathers and her grandfathers, all while grappling with the rapid ice loss and retreat of the glaciers. The result of which is her debut photobook When White Blankets – a bilingual (German and English) publication that combines her fathers writing, stills from her grandfather’s super 8 footage all those years ago and Nina’s own analogue photography documenting many of the same locations today. The result is both a meditation on memory, family and the mountains, and a confronting view of climate change all at once.
The main challenge for the artist when editing the publication was finding the perfect way to collate the project into a printed order that “balanced the beauty of the glaciers with the reality of their decline while finding a rhythm that honours three generations equally”, she shares. Once the book’s sequence had come together, merging her family’s past and present in a patchwork of words and images, Nina decided to partner with KOPA, a printing house in Lithuania to bring it into being, as one of the few print houses that still operates entirely on solar energy. “Knowing that the book was printed by the sun felt aligned with the project,” Nina says.
For Nina, the family photo project was both a way to “learn how to exist consciously within landscapes that may soon disappear, and to remain present with those we love,” she says. “I hope to continue to create work that highlights the importance of respecting our fragile natural world and to value time with our communities.”
When White Blankets launched at The Photographers Gallery in London as part of International Day of Glaciers earlier this year, with an accompanying short film surrounding the subject of vanishing glaciers. The book is available to purchase at The Photographers Gallery shop, Softcover and Nina’s own website.