In Snowscapes, Peter Dušek presents a series of photographs that distill the winter landscape to its most elemental forms: snow, sky, and light. Each image is a meditation on absence and presence, where the world is stripped of landmarks and human traces. There is no physical object, no manmade construction, no tree, no shadow of a branch—only the vast, undifferentiated expanse of snow meeting the equally boundless sky. This deliberate exclusion creates a space of pure abstraction, where the photograph becomes less a record of place and more a study of perception itself.
The sky, often overlooked as mere backdrop, emerges here as an element in the abstraction, echoing the minimalist purity and horizonless expanses of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascapes. It is not a passive ceiling but an active participant, its gradations of color and tone bleeding into the snow, blurring the boundary between ground and air. In some images, the sky presses down with a weightless density, compressing the scene into a single plane of pale luminescence. In others, it recedes into infinity, pulling the snow upward into a dizzying dissolve. Light, whether diffuse or directional, becomes the sculptor, carving subtle variations in texture and tone that reveal the snow’s quiet multiplicity.
The work seeks to evoke the ineffable: the way a single substance can hold a thousand moods, the way light can render the familiar alien. These photographs are not about snow as weather or season, but as a state of being—transient, mutable, and indifferent to our need for definition. In their minimalism, they invite the viewer to slow down, to look longer, to find meaning in the almost-nothing.
