Willson Cummer – Page 15 – New Landscape Photography

German landscape has been cultivated for centuries: created through continuous construction, destruction, rebuilding, mining and recultivation. However, until the industrial age landscape changed very slowly. Therefore, it appeared static and stable in relation to a human lifetime.

Only the advent of machines allowed mankind to change, destroy and rebuild, heap up and dig out landscapes within years, just like houses. Landscape photography used to treat landscape either as constant, changed only through the influence of nature or as something new, the result of human intervention.

The project called B404-A21 describes a process, the conversion of the route B404 into the motorway B21 on a stretch of 1.5 kilometres. The boggy terrain impedes motorway construction. Hundreds of piles are rammed 30 meters deep into the ground, thousands of tons of peat, clay and mud are removed and again thousands of tons sand are filled up, levelled, turned over and flattened again before being covered with nets, native soil, grass and bushes.

Creeks are diverted, pumped away, canalized and renatured. A distributor road, a motorway entrance and exit as well as two bridges are built. And every hollow fills with water, reeds grow, grass and weeds cover every pile of sand within weeks. Birds settle in, are driven out, come back or not.

Whatsoever: an awesome undertaking, a new traffic artery, destroyed nature, lush nature, profit and loss, a heroic undertaking and a devastation. The project is ongoing, bulky, and the outcome is still vague.

— Gregor Kuhlenbäumer, Kiel, Germany

February 9, 2017February 27, 2017

Raz Talhar

RazTalhar.com

Within the last few years, nothing has made quite such a dramatic impact on the natural Malaysian landscape around me as large-scale land reclamations have done.

It’s been both fascinating and disturbing to witness how fast once familiar scenes of “home” have been transformed and or completely destroyed. For this to happen, vast amounts of sand have been mined, transported and dispersed out to sea and along coastal areas, creating strange new land forms where once none had been.

My project covers five active reclamation sites — capturing them from land and sea. I’m interested in how these manufactured forms come into being and the process of them becoming a part of the working landscape. As to whether they are truly successful in doing this or not remains to be seen.

— Raz Talhar, Johor, Malaysia

February 2, 2017February 27, 2017

Maxime Brygo

MaximeBrygo.com

Through the installation Pavillons et Totems I question our relationship with history and myths by exploring a little-known or evolving heritage conveying experienced or legendary stories that stem from the construction of a collective narrative.

Tied to the former Franco-Belgian mining region, my approach is that of an ethnographer of humble places. At the CRP in Douchy-les-Mines, France I am presenting a set of photographs along with a sound montage played in the art center space, forming an installation that invites visitors to consider various sites and plunge into the stories these sites echo.

At the edge of a forest, at the end of a road, behind a curtain of trees, monuments loom up like apparitions, many of them ordinary ones that speak to the inhabitants of these territories and open their imagination. Their stories can be heard, like “micro narratives” forming a discontinuous and digressive narrative that envelops visitors and stimulates their imagination.

By superimposing images of places and stories of inhabitants like a mosaic, I poetize spaces by opening them to a multiplicity of perspectives and voices. Through these micro narratives, I allow the inhabitants of these places to reclaim their history and the history of their territory.

— Maxime Brygo, Lille, France

January 26, 2017February 27, 2017

François-Xavier Gbré

Le voile / The veil, Avenue des Armées, Sotuba, Bamako, 2011

FrancoisXavierGbre.com

November 2011. Bamako “la coquette” is changing fast. The works in progress create the new image of the Malian capital. In the Sotuba area, near the “sino-malian friendship bridge,” Korean artisans build monuments over hundreds of meters, to commemorate the glory of the veterans. In this area looking as a war theatre, between construction and destruction, the sculptures made in the style of socialist-realist works from North Korea tell us a lot about the concerns of the state.

On January 20th, 2012, the Malian army celebrated its 50th anniversary and the officials inaugurated with great pomp the Avenue of the Army with the National Band playing and revived specially for the event. The Avenue of the Army is the symbol of a powerful military force, it is monumental and filled with signs of victory. A paradox at a time when Mali falls into one of its darkest periods in history.

Fifty years after the independence, African States strive to write their memory but chosen aesthetics are often foreign-inspired. Mali Militari is a fable that lets us imagine the dramatic situation that Mali knows, with an army unstructured, unable to cope with the jihadists who threaten the country’s political stability and much more.

— François-Xavier Gbré, Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Paix et justice / Peace and justice, Avenue des Armées, Sotuba, Bamako, 2011

La fuite / The escape, Avenue des Armées, Sotuba, Bamako, 2011

January 19, 2017February 27, 2017

Steve Cordingley

SteveCordingleyPhotography.co.uk

Burntwood Quarry

For the past three years I’ve been documenting the reopening of a small sandstone quarry in Derbyshire, UK and on the edge of the Peak District National Park. The stone, known as Ashover Grit, is being used for conservation work on the nearby stately home, Chatsworth House. The quarry was last opened in the early 1900s and it is thought to be the source of much of the original stone used to construct Chatsworth House from 1687 onwards. The project to extract the stone is due to last until 2028 using low-impact, non-explosive quarrying techniques.

I’m using a variety of photographic equipment and formats, supplemented with sound, video and written evidence, to document the re-opening of the quarry until completion. I aim to self-publish a series of booklets throughout the project and exhibit a final sequence of work once the project is complete, subject to funding.

This selection of black & white film images are from January 2016.

— Steve Cordingley, Derbyshire, England

January 12, 2017February 27, 2017

Emmanuel Monzon

AdMonzon.500px.com

My work focuses primarily on the idea of urban sprawling and the urban expansion of its periphery. I photograph urban banality as though it were a romantic painting, trying only to be “stronger than this big nothing” in controlling the space by framing the subject. My aesthetic of the banal obeys its own rules: a ban on living objects, a precise geometrical organization, and the revelation of a specific physical and mental landscape blurring the lines between city and suburb, between suburb and countryside, a process that results in an independent identity.
This aesthetic of the emptiness in my photographic work attempts to understand our current environment.

— Emmanuel Monzon, Seattle, Washington, USA

January 5, 2017February 27, 2017

Hsiang-Lin Wang

HsiangLinWang.com

Metamorphosis

‘’Leave’’ is a representative word.

Things occurred, conversion is effected,

However, it is only a change in the form.

Still there, essentially.

Found the sense of security here which was lost for so many years in the past.

But lost my sense of belonging at the same time.

Nothing is forever.

Everything is permanent.

— Hsiang-Lin Wang, New York

December 29, 2016February 27, 2017

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

December 22, 2016November 28, 2016

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

December 15, 2016November 28, 2016

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