Gerrit Elshof

© Gerrit Elshof

GerritElshof.de

I find the edgeland fascinating. I am fascinated by the suburban area around a town that is not really town any more but also is not considered as nature. In Europe there is no untouched nature to be found any more. But some areas give you the illusion of an untouched area especially when the photographer tries to let the traces of man outside the frame. In this way the edgeland is much more honest to me. You cannot ignore the man-altered landscape and the edgeland does not want to be a spectacular beauty. It is more a subtle beauty. You can find man-made structures here that can complete the fragments of nature to an exciting image with rhythm and structure.

With my bicycle I cycle around the inner city of Münster through suburbs and the city near landscape. With my camera I try to create another picture of my hometown not dominated by the popular sights and places of interest.

– Gerrit Elshof, Münster, Germany

© Gerrit Elshof

© Gerrit Elshof

Vincent Bezuidenhout

© Vincent Bezuidenhout

VincentBezuidenhout.com

Third Nature consists of a series of images exploring a continued reflection on the constructed nature of the landscape, viewed in terms of contemporary spaces of recreation, commerce and suburban life.

The collective consequences of globalization, reflected in the contemporary sublime, and expressed as the terror we have created ourselves, forms the basis of this long term project.

— Vincent Bezuidenhout, Cape Town, South Africa

© Vincent Bezuidenhout

© Vincent Bezuidenhout

Raoul Ries

RaoulRies.com

These photographs, from a series titled Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, are inspired by Katsushika Hokusai’s famous set of woodcuts of the same name.

Hokusai’s woodcuts are part of a genre called ukiyo-e, which means “images from a floating world.” They are clearly composed in different layers, letting Mount Fuji hover above or next to the world of humans. 

Often civilisation intrudes graphically into Fuji’s sacred space. Trees or posts cut into the mountain’s silhouette, house roofs and other constructions imitate its triangular profile.

Hokusai’s prints share several elements with photographs: they represent fleeting moments while including indices of seasons, they create a memory of simple events and people’s relationship with time is a major subject in the images.

This series is about time, moments, seasons, years, lifetimes.

— Raoul Ries, London

© Raoul Ries

© Raoul Ries

Robert Doyle

© Robert Doyle

RobertDoylePhotography.virb.com

These images are from my project called Vistas — views from a few Superfund and brownfield sites in Western New York, not far from my home. These three images were made at the Albion MGP Superfund Site near the Erie Canal, in Albion, New York. They were taken on June 28, 2016.

Superfund – CERCLA is the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980. Initially the fund was financed with a tax on the petroleum and chemical industries, but since 2001 funding has come from U.S. taxpayers.

I started this project because I wanted to get to know my neighborhood a little bit better.

— Robert Doyle, Perry, New York, USA

© Robert Doyle

© Robert Doyle

Randal Barbera

© Randal Barbera

BarberaLightworks.com

I have been a fine art photographer for most of my adult life. For me, camerawork is like a meditation. It is how I organize and understand reality. It is a moment of poetry, without the constraints of language. There is an instant when the barrier between the observed and the observer, between inside and outside, disappears. At that threshold, there is absolute continuity. If a day goes by without at least one such moment of clarity and coherence, I feel I have missed something essential to my wellbeing.

Those of us who create landscape images, as well as those who enjoy looking at them, are all burdened to an extent by the historical, cultural and aesthetic norms the genre has evolved since the beginning of photography. Our view of landscape is inextricably bound to notions of “frontier” and “wilderness” that obtain from the geological surveys of the West in the 19th century, as well as to the panoramic vistas of more modern conservationist practitioners such as Ansel Adams. Such imagery, though “true,” and indeed beautiful, does not really exist, and at which subjects very few of us have ever looked.

We are surrounded by landscapes, both natural and constructed. We tend to block out those aspects of our living landscape that are merely utilitarian or vacant. But I have been, and continue to be, interested in just such places and in the constructed landscape more generally. My field of activity is the western USA. I am compelled by the sweeping emptiness of the west, punctuated here and there by suburban expansion, as well as the remnants of failed efforts to colonize. There is at work a very personal element of memory at work. There is a sense of passing — of time, of identity, of meaning. I enjoy looking at the overlooked. I am inevitably drawn to the places that are manifestly not “picturesque” as these places resonate with memory and loss.

— Randal Barbera, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA

© Randal Barbera

© Randal Barbera