Written by Yulia Fish
The Wolves Were So Bold That They Carried Away a Fresh Bearskin That Was Lying by the Fire
Nathalie Bissig
Wolves live close to people: in the woods, in the dark, each side careful not to cross the other’s path. In the Swiss canton of Uri, and in many places beyond it, legends and myths grew out of this closeness, out of a feeling that something incomprehensible waits in the dark, between leaves and branches. It is an ancient fear, and a curiosity just as old, that draws us closer to these images. The wolf stands for the underlying danger that people in Uri, omnipresent as a mountain regions once faced, and still face. It appears as a power that holds something beyond comprehension, as a wolf bringing the underlying danger. A fire marks the edge of the human world, and its light dances on the faces of those who tell the stories.
Nathalie Bissig inverts her photographs, as if a night-vision camera had lifted the shadows or X-ray light were passing through the surface. Grass, stone and slope are stripped of their physical skin and begin to glow. New details surface in the process: a face in the mountain, a sharp edge in the fur. The fields and hills seem endless, yet cut off from the everyday places we think we know. The longer one looks, the more mysteries gather behind the dark windows and the seemingly abandoned meadows. We begin to see something like the way a nocturnal animal sees.
Within this landscape appear her main characters, children from Uri and Ticino, in masks and costumes. Many of the masks carry animal features, hinting at a free, untamed side that may be buried within social structures. Bissig crafts the masks herself, in a tradition she grew up with, and for people in the region carnival is something organic and lived. The ritual of transformation begins in the making. A mask takes time, and it comes alive alongside the artist, who grows more familiar with forms and faces, creatures she did not know before. For Bissig this is already a ritual, happening long before the photograph. In doing so she deliberately builds a kind of pull, an intensity and charge, within which the images can come into being at all.
Masks and costumes are also worn to expel the winter from nature and soul. Here the children do not play with their masks but live through them, and they believe in creatures spread unseen through the natural world. The camouflage reveals rather than disguises.
Apart from the human-like spirits in masks, the monsters, beasts and ghostlike figures, nature is one of the most important presences in Bissig’s photography. It appears in its wild, untamed state, and in the black-and-white negative it seems even more alive and present than it would in an ordinary photograph. The shapes of weeds, the edges of stones, the grain of a slope, moonlike barrenness of the mountains: everything breaks through the threshold of the familiar visible world.
Are we witnessing a ritual, a performance, or a creature caught by accident in the shadows? The literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov (1939 – 2017) described the fantastic as lasting only as long as hesitation lasts: spirits, or small people dressed up to scare off the cold? The series never settles the question. The camera registers what the eye misses, an “optical unconscious” in which the negative image becomes a way of seeing, much as spirit photography and Surrealism used reversals and doubling to produce ghosts and shadows.
Bissig works intuitively, following those who perform the rituals and inviting the children to collaborate. She is a kind of chronicler of stories that exist unwritten but lived. Some images, like X-rays, seem to search for the core of a phenomenon, a point where science and art meet.
The wolf that guides us through the series is not only a wild animal. In folklore and mythology it is an eerie figure who stands outside the human order. Belief in the spiritual side of nature and its changes is not only an idea of the supernatural. It is a way of relating to the world, of living not merely alongside nature but together with it, with deeper admiration and respect for forces that go beyond and through the human.
The title comes from Kosmos Grosser Entdecker, a book of life stories, sketches and notes by Huw Lewis-Jones and Kari Herbert, and it takes us on an expedition into nature and its forces. The series Wolves by Nathalie Bissig runs from 2022 and built inside the bigger series Thunder, which collects over more than 20 years of work with the people and practices of the region. This project is also a kind of diary of that exploration, field-trips into the hesitation and the fantastic nature of human existence.