A family Super 8 archive from the 70s led Nina Maria Allmoslechner to make her first photobook

Nina Maria Allmoslechner is from a small mountain valley in the Austrian Alps and, even though the photographer is now based in London, the mountains are a landscape that she carries with her wherever she goes. The alpine glaciers that trace outlines around her home have naturally become an ongoing subject of exploration in her image making in the past few years. But it wasn’t until Nina graduated from her BA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, and left London to go back to Austria, that she realised this affinity with the alps and with image making went further back in her family than she thought.

On the first visit to her grandparents’ house upon her return, Nina mentioned her recent interest in darkroom printing and Super 8. “In response, my grandfather unearthed a massive box of reels,” she tells us. “A week later, we sat together with a projector, watching footage from their glacier expeditions in the 70s that they hadn’t seen in over 60 years. There it was: a photograph of my father and my grandfather standing in front of the glacier, white blankets in the background and then my father’s voice in my ear, ‘I can not believe how much these glaciers have changed already, I am sure they will soon disappear’.”

Since the discovery of her family’s archive in 2024, Nina has spent the last few years exploring how to weave together her own interpretations of the mountains she calls home with those of her fathers and her grandfathers, all while grappling with the rapid ice loss and retreat of the glaciers. The result of which is her debut photobook When White Blankets – a bilingual (German and English) publication that combines her fathers writing, stills from her grandfather’s super 8 footage all those years ago and Nina’s own analogue photography documenting many of the same locations today. The result is both a meditation on memory, family and the mountains, and a confronting view of climate change all at once.

The main challenge for the artist when editing the publication was finding the perfect way to collate the project into a printed order that “balanced the beauty of the glaciers with the reality of their decline while finding a rhythm that honours three generations equally”, she shares. Once the book’s sequence had come together, merging her family’s past and present in a patchwork of words and images, Nina decided to partner with KOPA, a printing house in Lithuania to bring it into being, as one of the few print houses that still operates entirely on solar energy. “Knowing that the book was printed by the sun felt aligned with the project,” Nina says.

For Nina, the family photo project was both a way to “learn how to exist consciously within landscapes that may soon disappear, and to remain present with those we love,” she says. “I hope to continue to create work that highlights the importance of respecting our fragile natural world and to value time with our communities.”

When White Blankets launched at The Photographers Gallery in London as part of International Day of Glaciers earlier this year, with an accompanying short film surrounding the subject of vanishing glaciers. The book is available to purchase at The Photographers Gallery shop, Softcover and Nina’s own website.