Plaza de Mulas

Plaza de Mulas is one of the largest high-altitude base camps in the world — a temporary town of tents at about 4,300 metres on the route to Aconcagua. People walk in with mules, eat, wait for the weather and leave; the mountain stays. This is about that meeting: a brief human presence at the edge of an ancient, indifferent geology.

I photographed it on two cameras at once, and the split is the whole idea. Large format black and white — 4×5, sheet by sheet, a camera you cannot rush — holds what is eternal and enormous: the walls, the ice, the night with its star trails. A small colour rangefinder, carried like a diary, keeps what is warm and passing: the red of a tent, the yellow of the domes, meat on a grill, the long shared table in Bruno's Kitchen.

I didn't go to summit. I went to look, and I don't regret a peak I never reached if I came back with a frame.