Author: Willson Cummer

I'm a fine-art photographer and teacher who lives near Syracuse, NY, USA
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Pablo Charnas

Charnas.net

This project concentrates on photography at night. I try to capture a unique atmosphere at the moment. The purpose of my project is a story about loneliness at night, out in the big city. For this purpose, I used only light and darkness.

I was inspired by the places which aroused my curiosity during travel at night. These places are borders of the city, found by spontaneously getting lost on the road. The images were created in the period 2014-2016.

In my project I used the weather conditions which existed at the time of taking the photographs. The long exposure technique is very specific. The pictures are created as unquotable. They are impossible to replicate.

— Pablo Charnas, Wadowice, Poland

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João Pedro Machado

JoãoPedroMachado.com

Ephemeral Landscape is focused on the reservoir created when the Lindoso dam was built, in which the waters reached farming fields and villages in both Portuguese and Spanish territory.


The word “ephemeral” embraces everything that is transient or of short duration. There are in nature ephemeral creatures whose existence lasts only a day. It was also nature that revealed the banks of the Lima River once forgotten, revealing the memories drowned under the cold and dark waters — that through photography became infinite and then disappeared again.

What caused this event was the extreme and unprecedented drought that took place in the Iberian Peninsula in the year 2017. Some say that it was the result of a one-off event, others show a certain concern. Be that as it may, there has been a manifestation of the climate changing that causes transformations in the landscape, shortening distances between countries and referring us to a global problem that knows no borders.

Spanish and Portuguese riverbanks appear side by side and witness the resurgence of this landscape with no sky, only with the dark blue of the water and the dry white of the banks of the river.

— João Pedro Machado, Portugal

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Benoît Chailleux

BenoîtChailleux.com

This ongoing series, titled La Loire and started in 2009, documents the linear territory along the riverside in my hometown and tries to show the conflicting relationships between Nantes and its river.

Nantes was formed along La Loire. The port has long been the main reason for the development of the city. (The triangular slave trade made its fortune until the 18th century). The port was enlivened by the loading and unloading of ships and by shipyards until the 1980’s. Now, boats with drafts ever deeper have to dock at St. Nazaire, downstream.

Nantes was called the Venice of the West because of the amount of river arms and islands, but in the early 20th century, many Loire arms were filled to make way for cars and traffic.

Today, the areas along La Loire do not have the function for which they were built. They have become residual spaces — although they are the heart of the city. The purpose of my series is to depict these linear altered territories and to reveal the atmosphere afforded by water. Sometimes ghosts of the past fly up the stream.

— Benoît Chailleux, Nantes, France

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Brendan Barry

BrendanBarry.co.uk

Clean Rooms, Low Rates is a collaborative, cross-genre exploration of the American motel. In 2011 and 2012 I hitchhiked, drove and walked 22,000 miles back and forth across the USA, photographing, among other things, empty motel rooms.

Each of the images in the series was taken after a day of driving, sometimes 10 to 12 hours worth. They always felt like some strange continuation of the journey, rather than a rest stop. There was this sense of perpetual motion in the space. I would lie there in the dark and could feel the road still stretching out before me. It was a bit like when you get off a boat and the land seems to sway for a while, I could always feel this sense of moving forward and beyond, so the images never really felt like interiors. They were landscapes — a continuation of the open road.

Standing at the intersection of economics, aesthetics, poetry, documentation, and fiction, Clean Rooms, Low Rates explores an alienated and anti-domestic landscape, full of oddities and banalities, shedding light on the problematic character of seemingly ordinary things. By playfully and collaboratively immersing ourselves in a private-turned-public space, especially one as aesthetically charged and culturally specific as a motel room, we allow ourselves to experience and examine the myth of the American dream. Inspired by the history of motels in some of the greatest stories of all time, writer Jeff Parker provided fictional texts to go with a selection of these photographs.

— Brendan Barry, Devon, United Kingdom

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David Paul Bayles

DavidPaulBayles.com

Two years after a neighbor clearcut a portion of the forest my wife and I live in, a fierce windstorm roared across the open clearcut and ripped apart, uprooted and toppled 120 of our trees. A few of them hit our house.

Foresters call it a catastrophic windthrow.

After repairing our home and re-planting our land, I began to photograph the tree farms that surround us. There are three distinct phases, beginning with the clearcut. Next is the burn phase where limbs are piled high and burned in the fall. In late winter and early spring new seedlings are planted.

In forty years, when the Douglas firs just begin to feel like a forest, they are felled and the cycle begins again.

From certain vistas all three phases can be viewed in a rolling mosaic of industrial efficiency and productivity.

— David Paul Bayles, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

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Chris Bashaw

ChBashaw.com

My work investigates the landscape of Southern California and the American Southwest through a variety of perspectives and for a variety of reasons.
 
These images are from an ongoing series called Terraform. Inspired by Percy Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” and a personal interest in Roman history, the photos in this series offer more contemporary depictions of mankind’s relentless hubris and evidence of nature fighting against it.
 
While we are capable of altering the landscape in long-lasting and unforgivable ways – either for practical or esthetic reasons – the land is always in a state of change, and inevitably reclaims the evidence of our tampering.
 
— Chris Bashaw, Los Angeles, California

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Cocis Ferrari

CocisFerrari.com

In the Borders series I want to show the role of plants on the boundary zone. The plants and the image of the forest interest me for two reason: first, to see plants as an alternative “monument” celebrating the quiet but incredible power they have on those places out of human control.

My second interest is to suggest a sense of disorientation due to the cut and the dimensions of my images. I want to represent the disorientation that we have on these kind of areas: a sense of not belonging, a sense of being somewhere we’re not suppose to be and suggesting a possible exit from “our places” so a possible sense of lost and fear.

The image of the woods has always been connected to introspection, unknown and mysteriousness. My Borders series wants to be just outside this woods. We’re still on the borders and here we can’t actually understand who is coming in and who is coming out. We can’t understand who is hosting and who is invading.

— Cocis Ferrari, Turin, Italy

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Chiara Raffo

ChiaraRaffo.com

The Wolfsschanze was the most famous and most-used Führer Haupt Quartier of Hitler, who spent a lot of time there to coordinate the troops during the invasion of Russia. Wolfsschanze is derived from “Wolf,” a self-adopted nickname of Hitler’s. The top-secret, high-security site was in the Masurian woods about eight kilometers east of the small town of Ketrzyn, Poland.

The 6.5 km-square complex, which was completed on June 21, 1941, consisted of three concentric security zones. The installations were served by a nearby airfield and railway lines. Buildings within the complex were camouflaged with bushes, grass and artificial trees planted on the flat roofs; netting was also erected between buildings and the surrounding forest so from the air the installation looked like unbroken dense woodland.

It was a hidden town in the woods consisting of 200 buildings: Hitler’s bunker was the largest object of the headquarters. It had six entrances from the north side. Its roof was 8.5 meters thick.

In October 1944 the Red Army reached the borders of East Prussia during the Baltic Offensive. Hitler departed from the Wolf’s Lair for the final time on November 20 when the Soviet advance reached Wegorzewo, only 15 kilometres away.

Two days later the order was given to destroy the complex. Despite the use of tons of explosives – one bunker required an estimated 8,000 kg of TNT – most of the buildings were only partially destroyed due to their immense size and reinforced structures. It took until 1955 to clear over 54,000 land mines that surrounded the installation.

Although the area was cleared of abandoned ordnance such as land mines following the war, the entire site was left to decay by Poland’s Communist government. However, since the Fall of Communism in the early 1990s, the Wolf’s Lair has been developed as a tourist attraction.

At first glance this might be a timeless place, only a lot of ruins. The series of images, on the contrary, far beyond documentary or historical research, force the human spectator to face the ruins through the tangle of the forest, gradually becoming more impenetrable and again “landlady.” The forest seems to create a barrier to the horrors of war and to rebuild its identity.    

— Chiara Raffo,

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Happy Seventh Birthday!!

I am pleased to wish the New Landscape Photography blog a happy seventh birthday! It was a cold day in November 2010 that I made my first posts — starting with the excellent photographer Jeff Rich.

It’s been an exciting ride. I’ve been honored to publish the work of over 570 artists. I’ve enjoyed getting to know each one a little bit, as we communicated via email.

Over 440 people subscribe to the blog via email, and many more see my weekly posts in Facebook. I created a curated spin-off on Facebook in 2014, and our vibrant group now has over 3,500 members. We post images, give feedback and encouragement.

My delight in all these endeavors is about more than the numbers, of course. It’s the joy of communicating with other people who are passionate about landscape photography. We may not always agree, but we believe in the importance of working to explore and depict our environments.

I don’t share my own work on the blog, but today I’m making an exception, as it is particularly appropriate: it’s a picture that I made on November 19, 2010, the morning of the day that I began the blog.

Thanks so much, and keep up the good work!

— Willson Cummer, Syracuse, New York, USA

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David Carter Lee

DavidCarterLee.com

My work over the past couple of years has been an ongoing project called Factory-Trees. Through various photo series I’ve explored concepts like cohabitation and colonization through the roles and relationships of physical elements within our common environment. 

These particular images are from one of those series called The History of Towns and Cities which considers the role human structures play in creating the space of our daily lives. Originally a means of surface colonization, our built artifacts over time start to shed value, and in the process begin to take on their own trajectories. These structures together form our conception of place. Though familiar, often to the point of escaping notice, our places and the elements within them continuously evolve, much like the organisms living among them. 

With this perspective a photograph becomes, not a frozen moment separated from time, but rather a documentation of change: complex, alive, in a steady state of collective becoming. 

— David Carter Lee, Atlanta, Georgia, USA