Walchensee

Lake Walchensee is one of Bavaria’s deepest and largest Alpine lakes, and on a clear winter day it’s easy to see why so many visitors who meant to stop “just for a moment” end up staying for hours. The water sits deep blue and unusually clear against a mountain backdrop that reinvents itself with every change of weather and season.

I was there in winter, on one of those days when the air is glass-clear and the light on the water turns hard and full of contrast. No sailors, no windsurfers in sight — in summer it’s a different picture entirely, the lake dotted with colourful sails, its steady wind making it one of Bavaria’s most popular spots for anyone who wants to get out on the water. In winter, though, it belongs almost entirely to the mountains, which mirror themselves across its surface whenever the wind falls still.

It’s little wonder the painter Lovis Corinth returned again and again to Lake Walchensee on canvas — few lakes in the Bavarian Alps offer such a constantly shifting interplay of water, light, and peaks. For me as a photographer, it’s a place I keep coming back to, simply because it never looks the same way twice.