Willson Cummer – Page 29 – New Landscape Photography

I’m interested in exploring the possibilities of the medium as a way to represent the passage of time and the changes in the landscape. I am very attracted by the power of photography to explain a concept without forgetting its evocative nature.

In Re-photographing Barcelona with Google Street View I intend to confront two archives of images. One historic, material and formed by the photographs taken by known photographers who have worked in the streets of Barcelona and on the other side another image archive, without authorship, immaterial and constantly updated.

As a result of overlapping both archives, we can show easily the evolution of a city and its history, the changes can be viewed more illustrative, but also represents a confrontation between the analog and digital photography.

— Pedro Arroyo, Barcelona, Spain

December 1, 2014November 10, 2014

Paulo Ayres

PauloAyres.com

Point your eye to the ground. Look carefully through the leaves, then you see some other color, a different color… a man-made color.

Camouflage is a ongoing series that explores man-made little artifacts mixed in the landscape. How long they’re there we do not know, and it doesn’t matter, because they’re already part of nature.

— Paulo Ayres, São Paulo, Brazil

November 24, 2014November 10, 2014

Ding Ren

DingRen.net

With a field-driven approach, my practice examines cross-cultural patterns at the junction between the foreign and the familiar. Recent projects Topographic Mindset and the waves would welcome it beneath the sea use analogue photographic processes to address geography, borders, and place in a phenomenological manner.  

In the mixed media series, the waves would welcome it beneath the sea, I traveled to Ireland in search of the sublime feeling of both beauty and fear that comes with standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking something. I wanted to investigate geo-cultural patterns and phenomena within the landscape. I wanted to prove that these coincidental patterns exist and that rocks, no matter where in the world, form a solid cultural foundation. I made rubbings of the rocks along the coast of Nohoval Cove while also photographing the cliffs. By chance, the rock rubbings echoed the photographs I took and vise versa.

— Ding Ren, Amsterdam, The Netherlands & Washington, DC, USA

November 17, 2014November 17, 2014

Justyna Badach

JustynaBadach.com

Untitled Seascapes are themselves like the sea: beautiful and seemingly straightforward, yet beneath the waves there is remarkable complexity that forms what we see on the surface. Drawing on a series of Monet paintings for inspiration, this series explores our deeply-held desire to be the first to find a place, to experience a landscape untouched by others, to make it our own.

In the 1880s, Monet painted scenes of the sea at Etretat in Normandy, which had become a bustling seaside resort by then. In his paintings, Monet returned the landscape to an earlier time, removing most signs of man’s presence. Turning to this same landscape for her ocean vistas, I created a group of serene images, devoid of the clutter of modern-day tourism. Like Monet’s idealized landscapes that were created in the studio — often from photographs, I use Photoshop to paste together sections of sea and sky and erase beachfront hotels and tourist boats. The scenes are lush and striking, all what one would hope for in a perfect, unspoiled landscape. Yet there is something impossible about them; they are like paintings, constructed from imagination and desire rather than documents of what exists. The illusionary quality of them reminds us that however much we would like to find an unseen shore that we can call our own, someone has always been there before us.

— Justyna Badach, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

November 10, 2014November 10, 2014

Kent Hasel

KentHasel.com

Briones is a regional park in the hills east of Berkeley and Oakland, California. I have been photographing the landscape and the cows that live in the park for several years now. There are areas that are wooded where I have been photographing the trees and where I occasionally find the cows, especially when the weather is hot. In November I went back into the woods further than I had in a while, past a tree which had fallen over the trail, and found a cow that had died.

The cow had been dead for some time as I immediately noticed that there was no odor and there were no flies. What was there was a shell of what used to be a living creature. Considering all the leather worn in the world it is probably not surprising that the shell of the dead cow would remain mostly intact even in death months after the fact. It has surprised me to see it still that way even after months of photographing it until the weather and the scavengers finally have left only bones.

I have photographed what remains. The abstract beauty of what remains behind is what draws me back to photograph time after time. Sometimes the image is so abstract that it is difficult to tell what it is, while other times — although abstract — the subject can be identified. There is a certain beauty in what remains of the cow, a certain stillness and beauty in death which I see in these images.

— Kent Hasel, Walnut Creek, California, USA

November 3, 2014October 2, 2014

Ricardo Esteves Pinto

www.RicardoEstevesPinto.com

The day I saw Saturn

Sometimes I need to leave.
To turn my back to the known places and just go. And search, and look, and feel.
I need to live it instead of reading, talking or looking at it through others’s eyes.
I need to experience something new, which will burn my mind as the light burns the film.

That day I saw Saturn.
That day I went to some abandoned mines.
An abandoned place is not really abandoned.
It was there before men; it will be there after.
It’s a place, even without a function, it’s there.
It just is.
Fascinating place, combining men’s leftovers with nature’s never-ending comeback. Not as a struggle, as an embrace.
The day was over, I entered the night. Through a telescope I looked up and there it was.
The rings are true.

— Ricardo Esteves Pinto, Lisbon, Portugal

October 27, 2014October 2, 2014

Eleonora Milner

www.EleonoraMilner.com

Lacuna/ae is a project of the Venice Lagoon, a changeable place by its nature. The word “laguna” comes from the Latin term “lacuna,” which means a hole, empty space, pond, pool, absence, loss or lack. The images I chose remind us of the idea of wrecks and trails in continuous evolution, never definitive. Lacuna/ae is also an investigation into the photographic medium itself: everything seems to be and not to be, turns out and hides…. nothing is definitive or stable.

— Eleonora Milner, Venice, Italy

October 20, 2014September 29, 2014

Theo Anderson

www.TheoAnderson.com

The photographs are not so much about place as they are about transformation. The context of everyday American life is used in my visual exploration. The search began in the early twenty-first century and is expressed in a myriad of episodes that inform my life. The episodes are revealed in my artist books, that I design, print and bind under the moniker wilbureditions.

All the photographs are from my ongoing work CADILLAC.

— Theo Anderson, Allentown, Pennsylvania, USA

October 13, 2014October 14, 2014

Björn Valdimarsson

www.BjornVald.is

I live in the remote fishing town of Siglufjordur on the north coast of Iceland, where we have long winters with much snowfall, and short but bright summers with 24 hours of daylight.

Most of my photos are made in North Iceland and often I deal with the juxtaposition of man-made objects and the environment. Siglufjordur harbor area, the heart of the town, is a part of the three photos presented here. Two of them were taken on a foggy winter morning and one on a bright midsummer night.

It was because of the good natural harbour conditions that the population in this isolated place grew from 300 in the year 1903 to 3,100 in 1950. And even though tourism and other activities are growing fast here, the sea and the harbour will always play a major role in our daily life.

— Björn Valdimarsson, Siglufjordur, Iceland

October 6, 2014September 29, 2014

Sergey Novikov

www.SergeyNovikov.com

From the beginning of the new decade the landscape of the provincial Russian town of Cheboksary has been subject to significant change. Positioned by the Volga river and known as a “town of seven ravines,” it is a capital of a peripheral Russian region. The processes that have taken place in that town are very typical for the entire countryside of Russia.

Accessibility to real estate loans and the wish of newly-minted citizens to have their own apartments are whipping up developers to overbuild previously unused territories in the town boundaries. First of all these are lands, neighbored with ravines, outskirts and private housing. The huge amount of cheap housing has changed the view of the town dramatically.

Being raised in this town, I couldn’t recognize its contours and forms during my visits in the last few years. Its character has changed and it’s never going to be the way it was.

I decided to depict the everyday life of the town with the background of raising buildings and cutting down hills.

— Sergey Novikov, Moscow, Russia