Of all the photos of the La Rosière galleries I like this one most.
There is moment of surprise, at first, when the viewer is aware of a certain shudder of fear: beauty on the brink. Delicate, fragile appearing trees in pristine snow-smoothed nature, presented quasi on nature's stage, and all that in front of an abyss of Miltonic grandeur with a turmoil of clouds. The backlight helps to stir up the colossal impact of this natural phenomenon, just as the soft foreground underlines the opposite effect.
The photo unites two key concepts of aesthetics with a rare intensity: the beautiful and the sublime, and in a way, the young Edmund Burke had described them in his "Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful" (1757), which in turn was of great influence for Kant's systematization of these concepts. The colossal turmoil of battle above the presumed horrible depth arouses fear, even terror by means of our imagination, so that we count our size and power as evanescent in relation to the vastness and infinite power of nature. Whereas the "terror [is] the common stock of everything that is sublime" (Part II, ch.6), the "appearance of delicacy, and even of fragility, is almost essential to" the beauty (Part III, ch.16); and smoothness, because it "is a principal cause of pleasure to the touch, taste, smell and hearing, [...] will be easily admitted a constituent of visual beauty" (Part IV, ch.20). As a result, we see: The composition of this photo owes its clarity more to a timeless classic formalism, but its emotional content is rather reigned by the underlying Romanticism that was foreshadowed by Burke's ideas. This is clearly one of Jono's masterworks, and I most certainly would like to hang it up in my hall for daily veneration, if there weren't already my own photos.
PS: I prefer the b & w version