I came across German photographer Peter Wildangers work this week, and liked it quite a bit, though some of what I assume are artist statements don’t pertain very well to the work.
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Archive for the 'photography' Category
For her series Re-unifications, Susan Silas couples images of the German Olympic Stadium, in what was West Berlin with images of the Jewish Cemetary at Weißensee, once in East Berlin.
The Helmbrechts Walk is a particularly profound set of photographs.
Helmbrechts walk, is a visual representation of the act of walking through a landscape marked by the historical specificity of the forced march of 580 Jewish women prisoners at the end of the Second World War. This book is a document of that endeavor - walking for 22 days and 225 miles in Germany and the Czech Republic on the fifty third anniversary of those events. A historically accurate reconstruction of the march route was possible with the help of the German trial transcript of Alois Dörr and historical maps housed in the New York Public Library.
Her ongoing projects Yard Bird and Bleeding Bird are also interesting.
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Crawl is the beginning of my ongoing investigation into a part of our landscape we, as upright creatures, rarely take the time to think about. Infants know this world for a time. Picnickers and soldiers glimpse it. There is no more dynamic stage of life and death on earth than the first few inches above its surface. This is where prairies and forests are born. Here is where the bulk of our food comes from, and where all terrestrial creatures return when we die. Comforting, beautiful, frightening, strange–this is the terrestrial world. And it can only be discovered and known intimately on hands and knees.
I really like Sally Gall’s photographs of insects. They’re unlike the typical macro photograph of a bug that is seen so often. They feel as though they are biographical or “a day in the life of…”.
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I came across Tiina Itkonen’s work back in January, and I must say, it made me feel even colder.
Since the early 90’s, Finnish photographer Itkonen has been searching for her Ultima Thule, or her “place in the Far North” in Greenland. She has returned several times, and has made beautiful photographs of the snowy landscape and iceberg-riddled sea, and the people that inhabit this all but barren land.
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Kashya Hildebrand Gallery
For the past seven years Sze Tsung Leong has been carrying out a still on-going project entitled “Horizons” depicting a wide variety of landscapes from around the world: locations range from Mexico City, to Iceland, to California, to Cairo. The horizon lies in the same position from photograph to photograph, thus creating the sense of a longer, wider landscape, despite them being from different parts of the world, and contain different subject matter, though photographs of cities really give the sense of the photographs being a multi-panel panoramic photograph of the same city.
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I really like the simple compositions and simple color palette in Matthieu Gafsou’s body of work “Surfaces.” The landscape is that of Tunisia, and the body of work treats the issues of a new tradition, culture, and architecture subverting those of former traditions.
All of the text on his website is in french, so unless you understand the language, you’ll have to plug it into Google Translate, though the text for Surfaces is in a jpg image, so it’s a little more complicated.
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This week I didn’t look for/at many photographers. I spent much of the time during my evenings trying to get through a paper called “The Machine in the Garden Revisited - American Environmentalism and Photographic Aesthetics” by Deborah Bright, whose writings I enjoy more than her photography, despite her images and the concepts behind the imagery being interesting in itself.
The Machine in the Garden is about the relations between landscape photography’s aesthetics and environmental politics. It was a pretty heavy read - I’ll have to sit down with it again on a day when I can read the whole thing at once. It was all very interesting nonetheless.
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The Machine in the Garden Revisited Direct Download (opens .pdf document)
The photographs in Theron Humphrey’s This Land is Our Land body of work are ones I find very relevant to my Urban Landscape photographs of parks. Humphrey’s photographs are landscape photographs, but like my parks photographs, are photographs of landscaping.
Landscape is a symbolic construction of certain social classes and how they signify their relationship to nature and communicate their social roles to others.
His predominantly blue and green color pallet and harsh mid-day light are two big things that really attract me to his photographs.
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