Denis Grau

DenisGrau.com

“I don’t want to see the typical touristic things.”

This is probably the most popular sentence of every tourist. But what do they want to see instead? The normal and boring things or people? Trash, dirt or poverty? Maybe this is exactly the non-touristic stuff. So, as a tourist, you do not want to see the reality. Discovering new things, beautiful landscapes or food – that’s what traveling is all about. But for the local people things are just normal: they see exactly the same things as the tourists. Only through different eyes.

Whenever I am on vacation, I try to see things with the eyes of the locals. The camera helps me a lot because you have to observe and be patient. A kind of normality is documented in my project Ordinary Japan. It is a subjective view of Japan and its landscape. 

— Denis Grau, Kempten, Germany

Christine Riedell

What were originally designed by Andre Le Notre in the 17th century as entertainment gardens for the kings’ court have become, in many instances, the terrain vague, or disregarded landscape.  The countryside where the gardens were built has become the city and the suburbs of Paris, France, turning the bucolic into urban landscapes. With a short ride from the city, one can enter a world of solitude, beauty and peace.  In my photography I have concentrated my focus on the periphery of the gardens, where time and space are given to contemplation and reflection.

These images are from my forthcoming photobook Going Out, which will be available on my website this fall.

— Christine Riedell, Richmond, California

Tamsin Green

Tammidori.com

Fundamental to human life, for millennia we have sought out salt. A search for the familiar daily grain in the vast expanses of the salt mountain, pan, lake and vein. Equipped with a geologist’s toolkit I went out into the field, following well-worn paths, maps, and Google Earth images. Born of the Purest Parents oscillates between the fragmented mineral specimen and the topographic survey. Through closely observed landscape features, scale and alienation are explored within both natural and man-made places.

— Tamsin Green, London

Gleb Simonov

N-e-v-e-r-t-h-e-l-e-s-s.com

I work in poetry and photography, the two being close in principles, but ultimately living on two separate tracks. My influences, in both cases, come from post-war modernism: Russian metarealism and the Language poetry on the textual side, and Düsseldorf School and New Topographics on the visual side.

What I’m trying to do is a meticulous study of structure that results in an ultimately lyrical outcome. The methodology of it is very impersonal and restrained, never directly human, so the composition is focused primarily on form, and the sentimentality comes from honoring it as such. In equal measure, it is a way of pointing and a way of worship.

So I picture small things, small movements, small differences in shades, suggesting that it’s the particular something, like the curve of a path, or the brownness of dirt, or the shape of an oak, that affirms the sensibility of life to begin with.

— Gleb Simonov, New York City (from Moscow)