Author: Willson Cummer

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

It’s Been 10 Years

“Your own photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people’s pictures too – photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.”
— Robert Adams

I started the New Landscape Photography blog 10 years ago today, and have published the work of almost 700 artists.

As people’s interests have moved from blogs and websites to social media, the submissions here have fallen off. I used to get three or four a week. Now I might get that many in three months. I’ve thought about stopping operations and just preserving the site as an archive. But my favorite part remains, though less frequent: the interactions with the artists who want to share their work with my readers.

Most work that I review is excellent. I select five images from the 10 submitted and sequence them. I take a more active role with the statements. I want them to be clear, inviting, personal and thoughtful. They usually are already. I’m impressed with the English-language skills of artists around the world, but sometimes a few tweaks are needed for clarity or accuracy.

Six years ago I created a Facebook chat group — also called New Landscape Photography. It has grown to about 3,500 members, with collegial sharing of images, questions and ideas. Though the location of activity has changed, it goes on. I know that I depend on other people’s pictures. And so I’ll also keep this blog going. Please let me know if you’d like to share work here.

The picture below is from my current project — investigating the 1,000-mile Finger Lakes Trail, a footpath that winds through much of New York State and its public forests. I’ve been exploring primarily on the run.

— Willson Cummer

Posted on

Barbara Barberis

BarbaraBarberis.it

For many years I have spent my summer holidays on the Riviera dei Fiori. It is a place I know very well, and to which I have already dedicated photographic series in the past.

Every time I come back here I enjoy taking long walks with the camera along the coast — from Ventimiglia, on the border with France, towards Sanremo to San Lorenzo a Mare. The images that make up this series are from the last two summers I spent in these places.

I have tried to capture very marginal and ordinary aspects of the landscape, which have a strong fascination for me.

— Barbara Barberis, Milan, Italy

Posted on

Balázs Varga

I Didn’t Take a Pill in Ibiza

In October, 2018 I spent two weeks in Ibiza, Spain, visiting a friend. My intention was to capture “the party island” in off season. It was interesting to see a place which is mainly focused on tourism be empty and chilled.

I went all over the island and I saw closed restaurants, empty beaches, and shops covered in plastic for protection from the winter. It all felt like a backstage in a theatre. The inhabitants of the island were really enjoying this time, when they can rest and prepare themselves for the next season.  

For the presentation of the pictures I chose the postcard form. I created postcards that probably nobody would send.  

— Balázs Varga, Budapest, Hungary

Posted on

Darren Lewey

DarrenLewey

Some 30 years ago I had read about Saharan salt and the caravans transporting it from Algeria and Mali into Morocco. Salt was literally worth its weight in gold. I can’t be sure whether I had read or imagined desert towns made entirely from blocks of salt. The notion of such a wild inhospitable place appealed as a place to write about. Many years later, I found myself much closer to the Saharan source of salt, living in Morocco. 

The small pockets of Morocco’s salt production located near its western coastline had been on my radar for years but photographically it seemed too unstructured and harsh to make any images there. Set across a few acres, these ad-hoc basins provide a source of income for local families. I saw the potential for revealing a chaotic harsh environment seemingly devoid of conventional photographic beauty in graphical terms. Its austerity in form became ever more appealing to me. 

— Darren Lewey, Essaouira, Morocco

Posted on

Enzo Crispino

EnzoCrispino.com

I need silence
like you who read with thought
not aloud
the sound of my own voice
would now be noise
not words but just annoying sound
that distracts me from thinking.
— Alda Merini

Seeking silence inwardly some time ago I felt like a tumultuous sky full of clouds threatening big thunderstorms. I felt the strong desire to hear what “noise” silence has. I could no longer remember. Such a whirling daily life was slowly leading me to be a stranger to myself and to the people around me. Every thought or gesture of mine was sterile, no longer transmitting emotions.

We are always immersed in noise and surrounded by people’s voices; noises distracting, moving away. I was seeking silence, to find myself, recognize myself in my lost identity.

One afternoon in March 2017 I sought silence on a beach in the Italian province of Ferrara, on the Adriatic Sea. I was looking for a beach unknown to me, unspoiled, without footprints. I was looking to get emotions as I used to in the past, to discover beauty in front of a simple landscape, in silence.

Remaining still and hearing just the sound of the sea, looking up into the sky at clouds full of rain well reflecting my mood, I felt very fragile; I was looking for my inner self. In that silence, I set out to photograph while recalling a few verses of a poem I deeply love entitled “I Need Silence” by the Italian poet Alda Merini. I wanted to transpose into every single photograph my state of mind, my feeling of disquiet, my bewilderment.

— Enzo Crispino, Emilia Romagna, Italy

Posted on

Lefteris Paraskevaidis

LefterisParaskevaidis.com

Impending Growth refers to the landscape that has been formed in anticipation of growth during the economic crisis in Greece up till now. It is a crisis that is being treated as something that has passed — like a wound that has healed — but the results of this return to normality are yet to be seen. And no one knows if and when this will happen at all.

As in the myth of Sisyphus every time he approaches the top something happens and the rock falls at the beginning of the mountain — inaugurating a new Calvary. People look like they have adapted to this infinite struggle — like living in a loop. One test succeeds another, and every now and then a new sacrifice is required to enable the coveted goal to be attained. People are on pause. Plots and houses that have been transformed into urban landscapes of abandonment.

— Lefteris Paraskevaidis, Athens, Greece

Posted on

Vasilev Dmitrii

VasilevDmitrii.com

The horizon is the visible line of contact of the earth or water surface with the sky, their border. This is an illusion that arises only because the earth has the sphere shape, but in reality, it does not exist, it is impossible to achieve it.

In my work Horizons I work with the concept of boundaries. The border is that which separates one from the other, internally from the external, that is why things and phenomena exist. The search for the meaning of things is connected with demarcations, with the search for qualitative and quantitative boundaries. In my work, I reflect on the possibility of searching for such boundaries, on our subjective perception of demarcations.

I pair the photographs of the surface of Mars made by NASA with the photographs of my body in such a way that the relief of the surface of Mars passes into the relief of my body. Thus, I blur the boundaries between the incredibly distant and the closest, between the living and the inanimate, between my image and the stranger.

— Vasilev Dmitrii, St. Petersburg, Russia

Posted on

Kazuo Haraya

KazuCamera8.wixsite.com

I walk around my neighborhood almost every weekend with my camera. I point it at views that most people find boring. I find beauty and solitude in those views.

There’s something about documenting a changing city that makes me feel good about myself. Photographing the city means documenting its changes, the changes in the environment and people’s desires and loneliness.

I will continue to photograph the quietly-changing city with my camera.

— Kazuo Haraya, Aichi, Japan

Posted on

Joan Sorolla

JoanSorolla.cat

An animal species dominates the world: Homo Sapiens Sapiens. In recent times I have been thinking that we do not deserve that last name. We are a horde of terrifying specimens that eliminates or modifies everything that does not serve us — including what we traditionally call “landscape.”

We can affirm that by modifying the landscape we modify our lives. But we could also construct this phrase in reverse: our lives are being altered because we are changing the conditions of the landscape.

One of the areas of my photographic work tries to approach and denounce this situation. When I speak of “new landscape” I understand, not the consequences of these transformations — that is, the radically altered landscapes — but the landscapes that are been altered at this moment (or at the moment when I captured them with the camera).

I am most interested in capturing the symptoms or the modifications in a first stage, since this way we can better appreciate the magnitude of the tragedy: the moment when the landscape is becoming a “new landscape.”

— Joan Sorolla, La Roca del Vallès, Catalonia

Posted on

João Henriques

JoãoHenriques.com

There is always a subjective aspect in landscape, something in the picture that tells us as much about what is in front of the camera, and who is behind it.  — Robert Adams

The inspiration to make these pictures came through this phrase from Robert Adams, a photographer whose pictures were part of the New Topographics exhibition of the 1970’s, in which some paradigms of landscape photography were questioned. The phrase also sums up beautifully the paradox of subjectivity and objectivity in photography.

These images depict the city where I live, Torres Vedras, one of them illustrating specific characteristic of this territory, in its planning, use, morphology, the other having been made immediately after the first, at its opposed plane of 180 degrees. From the second picture comes an aleatory, non-thought, non-determined photography, the pair granting an unexpected association and contrast between the identity of the place, as well as referencing ontological aspects of photography linked to objectivity, subjectivity, and canons of aesthetic reception of the landscape.

— João Henriques, Torres Vedras, Portugal