Month: December 2010

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Michael Werner


www.Michael-Werner.com

On my way back from Sydney, Australia to Frankfurt, Germany I had an overnight stay in South Korea. It was January 2010 and when we came out of the airport everything was covered with snow. It was extraordinarily beautiful and captivating.

The snow slowed everything down.  There was hardly any traffic on the roads and the city looked like a deserted landscape. As we arrived at the hotel, every TV station was reporting on the masses of snow — which seemed to be unusual for Korea.

I started shooting some night views from our hotel window and continued the next morning. The landscape, with all the construction sites and the empty spaces, was totally fascinating to me.

I immediately fell in love with Incheon and wanted to capture this unusual and beautiful part of Korea in this rarely-seen state.

— Michael Werner

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Doug McGoldrick


www.McGoldrickPhoto.com

The quiet of the night and the streetlights let me show the towns like they are a set, or a model.  The contrasty lights obscure some parts and reveal others.  In the day you may look at the car on blocks behind the store but at night the light only reveals what it wants to.  It creates an artificial reality and a cinema-like quality to the mundane.

When viewing these photos the viewer gets the impression that a car may roll up to the gas station or a person may walk out of the shadows.  A still image of a town at night becomes a movie set where anything can happen or just happened.

I love the dark stillness that the night brings.  These photos stop us in the places that we would otherwise drive though quickly in order to get somewhere — because they are nowhere.

— Doug McGoldrick

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Jane Fulton Alt


www.JaneFultonAlt.com

While accompanying restoration ecologists on prescribed prairie burns, I am drawn to the ephemeral quality of the single moment when life and death are not opposites, but rather parts of a single process to be embraced as a whole.

As fate would have it, this project began on the same day (and actual hour) of my sister’s first chemotherapy treatment, having just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

The parallels between the burn and chemotherapy were immediately revealed to me as I photographed with my sister in my heart and mind.

Burning helps reduce invasive vegetation that crowd out native plants, allowing sunlight to reach the seedlings. By opening the woodlands to more daylight, the fires prepare the soil for new spring growth, and the cycle of renewal continues.

So too, chemotherapy removes unwanted growth, allowing for new healthy cells to reestablish themselves.

It was with this deeper understanding of the life cycle that these images were created.

— Jane Fulton Alt