Approach. A photobook by Miguel Triano

I started climbing around ten years ago, in 2017.

Not in a beautiful gym with good coffee, perfect lighting and everyone training like professional athletes. I started in a very real climbing gym in Barcelona called Deu Dits, which sadly no longer exists.

It was a different time. You could still climb shirtless indoors. There were benches outside the entrance, and people would sit there after climbing, smoking and drinking beer. Everything felt a bit less professional, a bit less clean, a bit less optimised. Maybe less healthy too, obviously. But also more human in some way.

I won’t write too much about Deu Dits now, because that place probably deserves its own text.

But that is where it started for me.

I began climbing with a group of friends. Some of them left it after a while. Some others joined later. That is how these things work. At the end, only the people who are really touched by climbing stay around. Not because they are better, or stronger, but because for some reason they need it.

When you spend enough time in a climbing gym, you start knowing people. Some you like. Some you don’t. Some are just faces you see for years without ever really speaking to them. And some slowly become friends.

That is how I met Miguel Triano.

At first, he was just another climber from the gym. But quite soon it became clear we had more in common than climbing. Miguel was, and is, a photographer. I work as a creative director and graphic designer. We both moved, in different ways, around the creative scene in Barcelona. He introduced me to people from his world. I introduced him to people from mine. Slowly, without making a big plan out of it, we ended up sharing a group.

Over the years we have climbed together, travelled together, worked together, spent a lot of time together, and also gone through periods where we barely saw each other. 

In the end, that probably describes a good friendship quite well.

And, again, all this is just a way to talk about his book.

Approach is a photography book by Miguel Triano. It gathers part of his life around climbing between 2019 and 2025: landscapes, walls, ropes, trips, fragments of diary, and above all, friends.

That is the part I like most about it.

Of course, there is climbing in the book. There are rocks, routes, approaches, hands, bodies, gear, places. But I don’t think the book is really about climbing performance. It is not about grades, projects, success, failure or epic moments. Or at least not only.

It feels more like a record of the life that happens around climbing.

The driving. The waiting. The bad weather. The people sleeping in strange positions. The coffee before leaving. The tired faces. The stupid jokes. The landscapes you don’t know how to describe. The moments between attempts. The friends who are there, not doing anything special, but somehow becoming part of the place.

That is something Miguel understands very well.

Climbing can look like an individual sport from the outside. One person on the wall, one body moving, one route, one grade. But for most of us, climbing is also an excuse to build a small world with other people. 

The book has walls and mountains, but it also has intimacy. It has the people who were there.

And that matters.

I think Approach speaks about that without needing to explain it too much. It shows a way of being together through climbing. A bit messy, sometimes beautiful, sometimes very normal. And that is why it feels true.

I see Miguel’s pictures and I think about those first years of climbing. About Deu Dits. About people I still see all the time, and people I have almost lost track of. About trips that felt normal when they happened and now feel like small treasures. About how a sport can become a place, and how that place is often made of people more than of rock.

That is probably why I wanted to recommend this book through Amunt.

Because Amunt is an outdoor clothing project, yes, but the outdoor world we care about is not only about products, routes or performance. It is also about culture. About friendship. About the small communities that form around a shared obsession. About the people you meet because one day you decided to enter a climbing gym and stay there longer than expected.

Approach is a climbing book, but not in the obvious way.

It is a book about the edges of climbing. The moments before and after. The spaces between the action. The people around it. The life that slowly accumulates around a rope, a camera, a car, a wall, a trip.

And maybe that is why I like it so much.

Because it reminds me that climbing gave me many things, but one of the most important was not a route.

It was people.

Miguel was one of them.

And this book is, in a quiet way, a record of that.

Martí Canillas

Creative Director and Co-founder of Amunt