Look closely and you will find them: a line of climbers on a snowfield, two figures on a ridge, a single person among broken glacier ice. In his black-and-white series The Scale of Nature, Polish landscape photographer Jakub Polomski photographed people in the French and Swiss Alps to show how small a human being is beside the mountains.
“I wanted to show how small and meaningless human being is in comparison to nature,” Polomski said of the project. The photographs were all made in the Alps and converted to monochrome, which strips the scenes down to snow, rock, shadow and the tiny dark shapes of people.
Jakub Polomski, landscape photographer
Polomski is a professional landscape photographer from Poland who also works as a wedding photographer. His portfolio covers Patagonia, Iceland, Norway, the Dolomites and the rest of Italy, the Carpathians, Montenegro and Slovenia, and he has worked with brands including ZEISS and DJI. His images have appeared in outlets such as CBS News and the Daily Mail. The Scale of Nature remains one of his best-known projects and is sold as a series of limited-edition prints.
How people give mountains scale
Snow and ice are notoriously hard to measure by eye. A white slope with no reference could be fifty metres high or a thousand. Add a person and the brain recalibrates at once: we know roughly how tall a climber is, so the ridge, the crevasse field or the cornice above suddenly acquires its true size.
Polomski uses this in several ways. A long single-file line of climbers turns a snowfield into a vast, empty plain. Two figures on a steep slope beside deep shadow look almost weightless. A small person standing among towering glacier seracs makes the ice feel unstable and immense. The figures never pose; they simply walk, climb and stand, and their ordinary proportions do the work.
Why black and white works in the Alps
Removing colour leaves contrast, texture and line. Dark cliffs stand out sharply against pale snow, a boot track becomes a thin pencil mark, and a curved ridge leads the eye straight to the people on it. Blue sky and warm sunrise tones would compete for attention; in monochrome the composition is reduced to light against dark, and the human figure becomes the focal point of every frame.
Photographers who want to try the same effect should frame wide, place the figures off-centre and leave plenty of empty space around them. Side light early or late in the day brings out snow texture and long shadows, which add a second set of lines to a ridge.
The French and Swiss Alps
The Alps stretch about 1,200 kilometres across eight countries: France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein, Monaco and Slovenia. Their highest point is Mont Blanc on the French-Italian border, at about 4,809 metres, first climbed in 1786. The UIAA lists 82 official summits above 4,000 metres.
Most of those four-thousanders were first climbed in the second half of the 19th century, the so-called Golden Age of Alpinism, which ended with Edward Whymper’s ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. Glaciers remain a defining feature of the range, though they are shrinking fast: the glaciated area of the Alps fell from 1,817 square kilometres in 1876 to 1,342 square kilometres by 1973.
High Alpine terrain like the slopes in these photographs means glacier travel, crevasses and rapidly changing weather. Go with a certified mountain guide if you lack glacier experience: guide offices in Alpine centres such as Chamonix and Zermatt lead visitors onto snowfields and ridges.
For Polomski’s colour work in a different region, explore his Patagonia journey. For another climber set against a powerful ice landscape, see Christian Pondella’s Kilimanjaro photographs, or compare five mountain photographs from different regions.
Related reading
- Robert Bösch’s Mammut Photographs: People Giving Mountains Scale
- Sphinx Observatory at Jungfraujoch: The Science Behind the Famous View
- Step Into the Void at Aiguille du Midi: Glass, Height and Perspective
- Highlining Between Vanoise Express Cable Cars
- Solvay Hut on the Matterhorn: A Shelter Reserved for Emergencies
- Titlis Cliff Walk: The High-Alpine Bridge and the View Around It
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