VERONIQUE CHAPUY

Woman Looking Inward in Dialogue with a Mountain: The Mountain of Penukonda, India

Process Notes / Photographs made with Holga 120WPC Wide-Angle Pinhole Camera with a ND 8 filter and Across ISO 100 film. I used the Pinhole Assist App on my phone to calculate the exposure.

Artist Statement / Across cultures, mountains have long been understood as sacred territories — thresholds where the visible and the invisible meet, where the human connects with the divine. More than geographic formations, they act as living presences and symbolic axes linking body, consciousness, and territory. The mountain of Penukonda belongs to this lineage. Regarded as the “Kailash of South India,” it presents itself as a body with memory, a space of spiritual resonance. I traveled there and spent time at the ashram at its foot, where I began recording the mountain and its surroundings using different cameras, among them the Holga Panoramic 120 film camera. What I found was not only landscape, but a presence I could bear witness to. This project proposes the creation of a photographic archive built through pinhole photography, as a way of approaching the invisible — the symbolic, the energetic, that which escapes direct representation. In continuity with my project Looking For Her, I concentrate this inquiry on a single geography that holds, within its depth, multiple layers of meaning. Through the figure of a woman looking inward, the project proposes introspection as an act of opening — a form of deep listening that seeks to establish a dialogue with the mountain. In this encounter, the landscape ceases to be an object and becomes an interlocutor: mirror, guide. In a contemporary context marked by disconnection and violence, this project turns the gaze toward nature as a space of contemplation, knowledge, and transformation — an attempt to reconfigure perception and open questions about the relationship between the interior and the vast.