Mont Blanc does not reveal itself. It withholds. For three days the massif stayed inside its own weather, and the town below went about its business at the foot of something it could not see.
What the mountain teaches is scale, and scale is the hardest thing to photograph. A summit flattens into a pale triangle unless you can find something human in the frame to argue with it — a cable car strung across the void, a paraglider the size of a thumbnail, two bronze men on a plinth in the square.
Balmat has been pointing for well over a century. The mountain has never once looked back.
Everything here is measured against one object, and the object refuses to hold still.
Two hours north the rock gives way to water, and the problem inverts — nothing to measure against, only surface.