Snow Management Complex
Snow Management Complex gathers eight photographic series the Swiss artist Jules Spinatsch made between 2001 and 2013, documenting how ski resorts, hunting grounds, and other engineered landscapes are built, monitored, and maintained.
The book collects eight sequences: Tundra, Applied Landscapes, Fuxjagt, Arena, Endo, Run 1897-1941, Inventar, and Spectrum. They range from time-lapse views of ski slopes groomed by machine at night under floodlight to a set of found postcards from Swiss winter resorts made between 1897 and 1941. Spinatsch photographs each landscape as infrastructure rather than scenery. He tracks how snow cannons, bulldozers, fencing, and surveillance apparatus convert Alpine terrain into a managed tourist product. Codax Publisher issued the volume in 2014, distributed by JRP/Ringier, in a bilingual German/English edition edited by Markus Bosshard, Jürg Trösch, and Tobia Bezzola, with texts by Bezzola and Walter Keller.
Spinatsch (b. 1964) works at the intersection of documentary and surveillance photography. He often builds automated or panoramic camera systems rather than shooting from a single vantage point. His best-known project, Temporary Discomfort, recorded the security operations around G8 summits and the Winter Olympics. Snow Management Complex applies that method to the ski industry, and sits alongside his later book Davos Is a Verb (Lars Müller Publishers) in a continuing study of engineered environments.
