Richard Crow
In Heidi’s High the British artist Richard Crow makes reference to the myth of the nature-loving, virginal female living in the Swiss Alps, debunking the mountain romanticism and the seeming idyll elicited by the exuberant smile of the photo’s protagonist. The word written in German and Italian transfers the setting to the South Tyrolean Alps, whereby the encroachment of civilization into the area gives rise to the question of a loss of past romantic ideals. When set against the unstoppable advance of globalization and the communicational linking of all urban and rural areas, the Heidi myth is at the same time a reminder of a lost society, in which everyday life was less stressed and less dominated by anxiety. There is an element of compulsion in Crow’s Heidi image that causes the freedom of the mountains to flow into a psychical narrowness, raising the question of the extent to which this Heidi’s life overlaps with an affective situation reminiscent of a displacement activity in its alienation from the accustomed urban world, and how the bygone romantic mountain idyll has been forced to give way to the effects of globalization, whereby the refuges allowing a withdrawal from this new world have become increasingly rare. In a media-technological sense, Crow’s image and text fragment analyze the current cartographization of the world, most recently through Google Earth, whereby the word ‚camere‘ resonates with the meta-level of technological image-capturing devices.
