The Independent featured a series of before-and-after photos from photographer Lois Hechenblaikner‘s book Off Piste: An Alpine Story that show “how skiing changed the Alps” during the last few decades. One juxtaposition: a black-and-white photo of a backyard hen house next to a “Happy Chicken” fast-food joint. [%comments]
What Skiing Did to the Alps
TAGS: photography, Sports
and 
. You can also watch it on 
Is anybody else incredibly creeped out by how this photo series seems to be an argument that the purity of 30′s-40′s Austria has been polluted by outsiders?
You began with a false premise–that skying did this. I found a similar situation in Paris and at Monet’s home last year. Skying is a great sport, The Champs Elysee was gorgeous and Monet’s residences would have been a sight to see– had they not all become McDonalized to the point when a good deal of the charm of French culture and the rationale for visiting Monet’s home was lost in the effort to capitalize on the interest.
Addendum- please note– I am well aware of the fact that you cannot always know a book either by its cover or altogether by its Abstract. If this were true, I would not have appeared to let the cat out of the bag. Like these images, my book should be read, fact checked and analysed before judgment. But until then, would strongly suggest– “no rush to judgment.” Reminds me of another sociologist who rushed to judgment on a colleague only to learn, in hindsight, of the trouble he caused.
Wait… The independent? At http://www.telegraph.co.uk?
Not exactly newspapers with easily-confused political leanings, either…
you could say the same thing about any place on earth over 60+ years.
I’ve always thought Austria, more so than other European Alpine regions, got the balance just right. Skiers live side by side with local life in the villages.
If you want to see alpine commercialisation really done badly, take a look at France’s ski resorts – what was once bare or forested mountainside is now a citadel of 60s-era fugly cement works.