In the work of Slovak photographer Martin Vaclavik, memory is made landscape. Memento of Snow is a memory that holds the weight of time and seasons that disappear.

In the photographic series, created between 2023 and 2025, the mountains of Slovakia become an archive of suspended structures. The subjects of the photographs are chairlifts, ropes, pulleys and counterweights. Objects that once marked the rhythm of bodies and winter, but are now involuntary sculptures, monuments of a melting era.

The photographs —strictly in analogue black and white— capture fragments of these structures, trapping their geometry with an almost graphic precision. Gear wheels overlapping the sky, cables drawing suspended trajectories, concrete blocks hanging in the void. There is no human presence, but everything speaks of man. His desire to dominate nature is evident, as is his vulnerability in the face of its passing.

Vaclavik states that he is not interested in the landscape itself, but in ‘something repetitive, whether a texture, a colour, or an object that draws my attention.’ 

In these images, repetition takes on the appearance of a lost ritual. Each wheel photographed seems to repeat a past movement that will never happen again. Each wheel, suspended in the air, becomes a question about time and forgetting. There is a functional elegance in these now stationary structures, an industrial look that the photographer turns into visual poetry. His compositions, often centred and precise, bring to mind the calmness of Bernd and Hilla Becher, but without their systematic coldness. In Vaclavik, the machine lives in its silence, still breathing through the tall grass that surrounds it, or in the reflection of the sun caressing its surface.

The result is a constant dialogue between engineering and poetry. Behind the seemingly minimalist forms, however, lies a painful reflection on climate change, which has turned many of these facilities obsolete. The ski resorts of Zvolen, Kremnica and Banská Bystrica, which Vaclavik explores, now operate on and off. Winter, like the sound of these machines, has become intermittent. Therefore, photographing the remains of snow becomes a way of photographing absence. The act of remembering becomes a gesture of resistance, when everything else tends to dissolve.

The images move in a space between documentation and meditation. Vaclavik does not accuse, but observes. He allows the past to settle without feeling the need to reconstruct it. In this suspension, photography returns to its most primitive meaning. Each shot preserves a trace, just as ice preserves a fossil. Memento of Snow is not just a title, but a gentle invitation to remember the snow, and what we have lost along with it.