February 2015 – New Landscape Photography

These pictures are the product of my last two-year wandering in several places and areas of Attica (Greece), the zone between the city edges and the countryside. Edgelands depicts vague, ambiguous and constantly-changing landscapes that people often reject as being ugly or aesthetically unworthy.

This time I escaped the Athens city centre, the chaos, the perpetual mobility of the crowd; this time I turned my eyes to the edges of the city, where the spectacular and eye-catching frame tend to fade and disappear into the hazy and disordered flora. I ran off the main highway and followed much more peripheral roads — an uncharted road network, stretched like a web in the Attica basin, which indiscreetly unites underpopulated areas, industrial zones and slums. These are the narrow and insignificant roads we take when we’ve lost our way; these are the in-between areas which constitute the passageway from the city to the countryside.

All in all, my nocturnal wanderings in these places — so close to Athens but still so distant — revive the question of what is beautiful and what is ugly, what is significant and what is trivial — but most importantly where the heart of the city beats hard and unceasingly.

— Babis Kougemitros, Athens, Greece

February 16, 2015January 5, 2015

Asia Chmielewska

Asia-Chmielewska.com

These are extracts from my ongoing project Out Here, In There, which comes up from the observation of several suburban spaces, extending from locations in Spain to France.

I realised wherever I go out with my camera I am always focusing on the peripheries, the spaces that are unstable and most dynamic ones at the same time.

Being fascinated with the interaction between the constructed and the natural world and how that affects the way people move within it, I try to examine architecture, people, nature and their mutual interactions within this project.

I feel kind of an urge to record environment changes, suburban expansion, desolated and industrial spaces, waste grounds, man-altered landscapes and non-places. As if it suddenly mattered to take possession of such territories and witness the layers of change occurring in my urban reality.

— Asia Chmielewska, Paris

February 9, 2015January 5, 2015

Gustavo Boemi

GustavoBoemi.tumblr.com

Drifting in the city sometimes my eyes are captured by something or someone I would not expect. One day, in fact, during a walk my attention and my camera were attracted by a road sign covered with colorful flowers. The colors of the flowers contrasted with the grey of sky and asphalt. Those flowers were placed there by relatives or friends of a victim of the road. Lately I discovered many memorials like this in my city and in other Italian cities. If we read the statistics of deaths in road accidents we remain petrified by the proportion of the case. That’s why I’ve called this series A Silent War. There are many deaths, but spaced out in the 365 days they will not impress public opinion.

Except the associations for sustainable mobility no one hits the road to protest against the enemy that kills. We have few moments of dismay when we hear news of a road victim, moments that become hours or days if the victim is a friend, the days become eternity if it’s a beloved one. Well, these are the memorials in my city. They are not usually captured by the eyes of the drivers, and still are perceived as something alien to our lives. These altars represent the pain that widens in the city. The collective unconscious wants to remove it and forget about it. Every time we go down the road we should think that we are sitting on a weapon and we must remember the martyrs of this silent war.

— Gustavo Boemi, Turin, Italy

February 2, 2015January 5, 2015

Yoichi Kawamura

YoichiKawamura.com

Release

A horizon line represents a gateway to Enlightenment — a Release, which is…
The marriage between the Carnal and the Eternal worlds (Joseph Campbell)
The axis mundi: an established center point or navel of the universe (Mircea Eliade)
The connection of the sky with the ocean, the desert, or the Midwest Plains that leads the viewer to his or her inner place of self.

This work records my visceral experiences of seeing the connection between the world of physical reality and the unseen inner world of consciousness. The images represent the moment where we, as physical beings, touch the ethereal world. Where we can choose open space and gently, passionately, visually, emotionally, spiritually, physically, and meaningfully experience the point of release between the Eternal and Carnal worlds.

Carnal space is essential, a prerequisite for life. Our bodies are a product of nature, made from materials in the universe that produce impulses and needs that result in the creation of our material world: a world of time and space, a world of suffering and sorrow, a world of reality. Eternal space is that which is seen but not felt. Called emptiness or nothingness in Buddhist traditions, it is timeless and infinite, the sublime. Never nihilistic but expansive like the universe, it is inside us and exists without judgment.

Empty space contains meaning and offers choices to create the eternal or profane space — the mindful Zen garden of Ryoan-Ji in Kyoto or the chaos of Las Vegas. When space is devoid of meaning, we risk creating T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland — a world without significant inner meaning.
There needs to be a balance. In all our scientific undertakings and successes, we have improved the material world. Progress in our understanding of the Eternal space has not been equally as successful. Yet, intuitively, we sense that the profane and sacred live side-by-side as equals within us. Without the sacred, we live in the profane, or The Wasteland. Without the profane, we cannot attain the sacred. To live only within the sacred would have no meaning within the profane. It is only by embracing the sorrow and death in the world of space that we find meaning (or give reference to the sacred) found in the moment and eternity of life.

The images are intuitively composed so that open sky and reality are paired, yet open space is predominant. As opposed to traditional imagery (in antiquity) where the sky usually represents the male energy and the earth (and moon) represents female energy, I unconsciously reversed these qualities: the sky is more feminine and the ground is more masculine. The horizon in many images represents the release point between human existence and ethereal meaning.

Shades of blue are predominant in this work. Optically, blue is perceived from the oldest parts of our optical system. I believe that our penchant for Blue represents our evolution as organisms from the ocean. When basking in an ocean wave, we look up and see either blue water or blue sky. Clear blue skies are hopeful and emotionally attractive, commonly associated with values such as harmony, faithfulness, infinity, and safety; it is consistently the most popular color worldwide. Cloudy images create a Ganzfeld effect, where our eyes lose reference to visual reality. When combined with horizon, they suggest a point of release, where eyes lift upward into the expanse of the eternal while also turn inward into the expanse of the self.

— Yoichi Kawamura, Claremont, California, USA

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