Belluscio, Giordan, Bellini: The 2011 Public Vote, and the Juries That Replaced It

The Internet Archive holds four captures of clickonthemountain.com/index.php from 2011 — 1 April, 28 June, 28 and 30 August — all byte-identical. It is a small page: a panel headed Voto OnLine pointing visitors at a photo gallery and asking them to vote for the frame they liked best, a link to a video section, and a short standings box headed Top List. Three lines sit in that box, each pairing a surname with one image file — Belluscio first, Giordan second, Bellini third. A fourth link, to the complete standings, was never captured. A fifth capture of the same address, made on 3 February 2013, shows the template rebuilt around the 2012 edition: the Voto OnLine panel is still there, and the Top List box is empty.

That box is the only public leaderboard the contest is known to have published. It is not the only time it asked the public something — from 2016 an Instagram category made community likes the first filter — but the award was settled by a jury in every year after 2011, and for eight of the ten years no source located for this piece names a single person who sat on one.

Four captures, one leaderboard

The third edition ran from 22 to 26 March 2011. The Italian snowsports site neveitalia.it, publishing on 30 March 2011 alongside a portfolio reel from one of the competing photographers, gives the ordinal and the dates and calls the event the most important Italian freeride photography contest. The archived historical-archive page for 2011 labels Team 1 the winner of the third edition, and the roll of honour on the site's later clickotm/index.php page lists 2011 against Alessandro Belluscio.

What the leaderboard ranked was not a body of work. Each of its three lines attaches a surname to one image filename — a single frame per name, out of a gallery. The jury of the same edition was choosing between four books. Those are different questions with different answers, and the archived page gives no indication which one the organisers thought they were asking.

What cannot be established should be stated exactly. On collection, the archived /vota.php page says only that a visitor should look at the gallery, click the frame they like most, and vote. Nothing archived and nothing in the press located for this piece says whether a visitor could vote more than once, how long polling stayed open, or whether the result carried weight in the award. The public's favourite frame and the edition's winning book carry the same surname; that is a coincidence of names until a source says otherwise, and no source does.

One more absence is worth recording without explaining. By the time the site's video index was captured in 2013 it listed three photo-book films from 2011 — Belluscio, Giordan and Bellini — and none for Laurent Salino, who is on the roster and off the Top List.

The four teams of 2011

The archived roster is short, and inconsistent with itself in ways worth printing rather than tidying away.

Compiled from the archived per-team pages 2011-team1-226 to 2011-team4-229 and the archived archivio.php?anno=2011, Internet Archive, checked 6 August 2026. Team 1 is labelled winner of the third edition on the archive page.

The two archived sources disagree on spelling more than once. The historical-archive page gives the Team 2 photographer as Andrea Jordan against Andrea Giordan on the per-team page and in neveitalia.it, and has Matteo Borgard and Margot Rosies where the team pages have Borgardt and Rozies; Mathias Fabbro appears elsewhere on the same site as Matthias. This desk follows the per-team pages, records the variants, and will correct any of them on the word of the person named.

Two structural gaps sit in the same table. The archived 2011 roster files every rider under the snowboarder heading and leaves the skier field empty for all four teams, which the 2010 and 2013 pages do not, so the disciplines in the line-up are not established; and the 2010 page names an alpine guide per team while the 2011 page names none. Those are absences in a web page, not evidence of absences on the mountain, and they are left as such.

What an open vote rewards

Set the 2011 panel beside the instruments that decide this kind of photography now and the differences are structural rather than a matter of taste.

The first is the unit being judged. The Banff Centre's published entry regulations for its Mountain Photo Essay Competition cap that unit at five images — the 2025 regulations circulate in two revisions, one setting a floor of three and one no floor at all — and state what the sequence must do: each image must be "strong enough to stand on its own while conveying a greater narrative when viewed in the photographer's desired sequence." A gallery vote cannot ask that; the ballot is one picture wide. Whatever the 2011 leaderboard measured, it was not the property the Courmayeur format was built around — four photographers each delivering a book, assessed in the criteria the 2015 jury published on the event's news page partly on "l'idea generale di realizzazione del book", the overall conception of the book.

The second is attribution. A public vote on a captioned gallery is signed by construction: the voter sees the name before the picture. The institutions that publish their rules have moved the other way and say why in the rules themselves. Red Bull Illume's contest rules, as published for the 2016 Image Quest and archived in July 2016, state that judges receive a book of the semi-finalist images with "no metadata or photographer information [...] to maintain impartiality"; its 2023 FAQ, asked how it can be sure judges are not partial, replies that "all images will be made anonymous before the judges receive them." The Banff Centre stops short of that. Its 2025 regulations require only that the "photographer's name should not be visible on images", adding that every effort is made to judge entries on the image alone — a format rule, printed beside the ban on watermarks, mattes, frames and borders, and so about what is burned into the picture. The file-naming rule runs the other way: every file submitted must carry the entrant's own last name, then first name, then essay name and number.

The third is what an open ballot measures when nothing constrains it, which is reach: a photographer with a large audience and a link to share is running a different race. The rules examined here handle that by keeping the public vote away from the main award rather than by refusing it. Red Bull Illume's 2016 rules created two parallel honours for the purpose — a People's Choice Award, opened to the public once the finalists were announced, and an Athletes' Choice Award voted by invited athletes — both separate from the category winners and from the overall winner, decided by the photo-editor panel. The public is not excluded. It is given its own trophy.

Click on the Mountain arrived at the same arrangement five years after the leaderboard came down. Its archived Challenge Instagram pages for 2016, 2017 and 2018 open a hashtag to anyone and state the mechanism: the frames most liked by the community are the ones selected and put to the official jury — a second step, in the English 2018 wording. The archived 2016 and 2018 news pages fix the number at fifteen, published on the site for a jury to choose from. Likes decide who is looked at, not who wins, and the category carries its own award — Best Instagram Click in 2016, a special prize in 2017 and 2018 — separate from the book.

Blind rooms, published criteria

Three institutions publish criteria in enough detail to compare. They do not agree with one another, which is the useful part.

Red Bull Illume contest rules for the 2016 Image Quest, Internet Archive capture of 18 July 2016, and the 2023 FAQ and Rules page; Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, "2025 Mountain Photo Essay Competition — Photo Essay Entry Procedures and Regulations"; Alpine Club of Canada, 2026 GMC Photo Contest rules. Checked 6 August 2026.

The Alpine Club of Canada, announcing its 2025 results, wrote that judging photography, like any art form, is subjective, and that its panel had tried to set its biases aside. Red Bull Illume's rules instead legislate for deadlock: a tie in any round is broken by a determining vote from the internal panel, and a tie in the second round is settled by first-round vote count. Contests that publish tie-breakers have thought about ties.

Three hours and twelve prints

What Click on the Mountain published about its own apparatus is fragmentary, but it is not nothing, and two years are unusually well documented. The German freeski title skiing.de, in a report bylined "teddy" on 13 March 2013, describes the fifth edition's judging in concrete terms. Twelve large prints had been hanging since the Friday afternoon, three from each of the four teams, chosen to give a first impression of the styles and action of the preceding days. After three hours of close examination by the judges on site, supported by four online judges from across the Alpine region, the result was settled — and each team had also submitted a twenty-shot book, assessed on how completely it caught the ground around Courmayeur.

That room can be named, and 2013 is one of only two years in which it can. planetmountain.com, publishing on 3 March 2013, gives the technical jury as eight: Manuel Castelnuovo of the Scuola di Sci e Snowboard Courmayeur in the chair, Eleonora Greco and Damiano Levati as photographic technicians, Ian Shottler on sports photography, Mattia Piccardi on snowboard, Stefano Gex on ski, Ben Burnett on editorial, and Ivette Clavel for the Comune di Courmayeur. The same report carries that jury's reasoning for the book it chose, Richard Felderer's — a wide variety of situations, attention to aesthetics, particular care in the night shots — over books by Roman Lachner, Louis Garnier and Alessandro Belluscio. A Stefano Gex sits on the 2011 Team 4 roster as a rider; whether that is the 2013 ski technician, no source located says.

The other exception is 2014. The Aosta Valley outdoor site discoveryalps.it, reporting on 4 March 2014, records seven judges from across Europe examining the four books, names Sebastian Huber as head of the jury, and quotes him saying the standard of riding and photography was the highest ever seen at the event and that finding a winner had been genuinely difficult, above all in the overall category. It was, in the end, not found: the scores levelled, the judges declined to separate Tero Repo from Daniel Rönnbäck, and the €4,000 prize was split. Marius Schwager took Best Ski Photo and Tim Lloyd Best Snowboard Photo — two spellings of that name survive the week, discoveryalps.it's preview of 27 February 2014 giving the Team 4 photographer as Schwaiger against Schwager in its result piece and in skiing.de. A Sebastian Huber appears on the 2012 and 2013 rosters as a rider, which no source located connects to the head judge.

By 2015 the criteria themselves were published, in the jury's own statement on the event's news page: creativity, post-production — all but indispensable by 2015, the statement says — composition, the level of riding, and the overall conception of the book, with the winning portfolio, Klaus Polzer's, praised for uniformity and internal consistency as much as for any single frame. The judges are again unnamed, and the last edition kept the pattern: for 2018 the jury is described only as experts from sport and from action-sports imaging, and its reasoning reaches the record as two quoted motivations. Aostasera, reporting from Courmayeur on 11 March 2018 under the byline of Silvia Savoye, prints the jurors on the winning photograph — "Della foto di Polzer ci ha colpito l'azione che trapela dall'immagine, è molto dinamica, con bei contrasti e una luce fantastica" — what struck them in Polzer's photograph was the action coming through the image, very dynamic, with good contrast and a fantastic light. Even the award names from that year do not agree: the site's English winners page credits Adam Klingeteg and Erik Lundmark with Best Street Shot, where ANSA's Courmayeur item — ANSAcom material produced with the event, citable for results on that basis and not independent reporting — calls it Best Urban.

Where the 2011 work sits

No photograph from any edition is reproduced on this site, and the four 2011 books are not published in full anywhere this desk could find. What survives is the photographers' own work. Alessandro Belluscio, who founded and ran the Italian freeski magazine 4Skiers between 2006 and 2011 and won the third edition, still works under his own name; his personal domain, checked on 6 August 2026, resolves only over unencrypted HTTP and returns pages buried in server warnings, so it is described here rather than linked. Andrea Giordan's 2011 portfolio remains where it was first published, on neveitalia.it, dated 30 March 2011 — the only page found in this session still carrying 2011 Click on the Mountain imagery. Federico Bellini, based in Brescia and formerly photographer and editor-in-chief of Entry magazine, keeps a portfolio at LensCulture. Laurent Salino, on Team 3 and the one name missing from that Top List, publishes at laurentsalino.com.

The open leaderboard lasted one edition out of ten. The public came back in 2016, screened into an Instagram category whose first round was decided by likes, and not into the award. That was a room in Courmayeur with prints in it, and for eight of those ten years the record does not say who was standing in the room.