Willson Cummer – Page 30 – New Landscape Photography

Cette montagne c’est moi

In January 2006 I started to photograph slag heaps in Belgium, France, Germany, Poland and Wales. These mountains are the visual remnants of the coal mining industry. In Europe these black pyramids are the symbols of a vanishing era that began with the industrial revolution and has now evolved into an age dominated by binary code.

For this project I reformulated the 19th-century technique of carbon printing. From every mountain I photographed I took some coal, milled it into a pigment which I used to print the negatives. Various shades of browns and blacks reflect the specific constitution of the slag heaps. The almost uniform shapes of these landscapes are translated into a highly individual approach. In this work object and subject, mountain and photograph, have become one. The photographs show us the socio-political reality of the last 100 years. They reflect the changing relationship between man and his environment in such a way that mind and matter are closely tight together.

— Witho Worms, Amsterdam, Netherlands

September 22, 2014September 1, 2014

Jeffrey Yuan

www.JeffreyYuan.com

In 2010, I began an exploration of the intersection between photography and classical Chinese landscape painting, with the Homage to Ni Zhan and Bada Shanren series. In the Wasque Series, which was taken at Wasque Beach on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts, I extend this exploration. If classical Chinese painters ground their work in the style of a previous artist, I seek to ground my new work on my previous series, but also to evolve its style and technique while remaining true to my original sensibilities.

As in the original series, this new series’ sensibility continues to be grounded in the 13th century landscape painter Ni Zhan, who is known for his spare style of thin ink work, and in the 17th century painter Bada Shanren, who is known for his impressionistic style and unsettling compositions. In these images, I continue to over-exposure, aiming to capture the backbone of the landscape. Yet, unlike the work of Ni Zhan and Bada Shanren and my earlier 2010 series, I have introduced color. In this manner, I continue to explore the intersection of photography and Chinese landscape painting by having introduced elements of the Tang Dynasty (7th C. -– 10th C CE) court painters in this new body of work, where color is used in a limited fashion.

— Jeffrey Yuan, Plainsboro, New Jersey, USA

September 15, 2014September 1, 2014

Francesco Taurisano

SEPT 15 Francesco TaurisanoA

www.CargoCollective.com/FrancescoTaurisano

Nothing to Write Home About is an intimate reflection through photographs, exploring the narratives of the people and the places where I grew up. In this work I am trying to question the fragile and uncertain future of working class families living in Trivero and the surrounding villages in the region of Piedmont, Italy. It is a meditation on the notion or idea of home, in contrast to how it is commonly represented.

Life in such a rural village, in the countryside, now appears to offer very little to this community. The economic collapse of the wool industries which provided the main source of income for the majority of families resident in Trivero has taken its toll. The younger generation experiences great difficulty coping with this economic reality and their increasing sense of insecurity has manifested in forms of self-destructive behaviour and an inability to make decisions.

This unstable situation is also a narrative thread for the surrounding landscape: the increasing emptiness of the territory, turning houses and factories into derelict ruins which function as reminders of past prosperity. Photographing the rural landscape is a way to tell the story of these people and to underline how human intervention has shaped the valley where they are living.

— Francesco Taurisano, Dublin, Ireland

September 8, 2014September 1, 2014

Carla Andrade

www.CarlaFernandezAndrade.com

Landscape, understood as an indissoluble part of what we are, is essential in all my work: reinterpretation of nature in a global and hyper-technical present. Landscape interests me not only from an ecological reading, as the experience of inhabiting the universe, space whose annihilation is our own self-destruction, but also, and above all, the return to nature as a political legitimation of the Human, as a simple and powerful revolution.

Landscape is an element that we dispossess but men want to dominate it. Longing for open spaces to re-establish continuity with nature. Landscapes in which nature and men are confronted, but where, at the same time, an ecstatic reaction occurs between them. Between man and nature there is a metaphysical tension.

There is a deep personal desire to improve the immediate present to alleviate a characteristic material dissatisfaction. Here, individual feelings become universal. In my work there is no experimentation, but experience. They are images captured in moments of visual release, a kind of exaltation of desire. Poetic-scientific seizure of the world, use of a “sensible reason.” Search the “Poetic Image” understood “sudden highlight of the psyche ” (Gaston Bachelard).

My photography is halfway through documentary, fantastic and experimentation. I photograph reality to make it to go beyond reality but through itself, without tricks or interventions. This is why I like to investigate my subconscious and liberate it when I take pictures.

— Carla Andrade, Vigo, Spain

September 1, 2014August 28, 2014

Don McKenna

www.DonaldJMcKenna.com

I continue to be fascinated by the magnificence of light and how it affects the complex shapes and colors of our human-made and natural world. I find the act of observing with persistent and intense attention to detail inspirational. This experience creates a state of mind, however temporal, that allows me to find hope and meaning in the physical beauty that is our external world. Through my photographs, I wish to share that simple pleasure with others.

— Don McKenna, St. Louis, Missouri, USA

August 28, 2014July 28, 2014

Matthew Arnold

www.MatthewArnoldPhotography.com

Topography Is Fate — North African Battlefields of WWII considers the varied landscapes of North Africa that the soldier of WWII was forced to endure. Thousands of miles from home, largely untraveled and ignorant of lands and peoples outside his home country, he was dropped onto the shores of what must have seemed to him a dangerous and alien environment — his understanding of the land limited to stereotype, myth and the relevant army field manual.

The approach is conceptual, with the photographs of the North African battlefields presented, similar to the New Topographic photographers of previous generations, in an almost anonymous and neutral tone of voice. The images are taken in daylight, without complexity and noise, portraying a peaceful quietness of the desert and grassland to allow viewers to fill in that negative space with their own visualization of the war.

— Matthew Arnold, New York City

August 25, 2014July 28, 2014

Paul Walsh

www.PaulWalshPhotography.uk

I am interested in exploring the relationship between walking and photography. All Things Pass traces my walk along the hundreds of miles of canal towpath that connects the river Thames in London with my parent’s home in Birmingham.

When I got the news of my mother’s illness, a condition that left her unable to walk, I travelled back and forth on the train between London and Birmingham to visit her. I remember gazing out of the train window wondering what it would be like to make the journey on foot, along the canal I could see running alongside the train line. I decided that for once I would make the walk back home, into the house where I was born.

In the current light of my mother’s illness, I became caught up in thoughts about the ephemeral nature of places as I walked. The deteriorating factories of the city soon gave way to pastoral landscapes and I became aware of the fleeting nature of the world around me, as everything I happened upon came into view before disappearing behind me. I set out to make photographs of the places that lie beyond the view of the canal from my mother’s bedroom window. I also wanted to show how places deteriorate and succumb to decay, yet many recover, transform and eventually find a way to thrive again.

— Paul Walsh, Brighton, United Kingdom

August 18, 2014August 20, 2014

Charles Roux

www.CharlesRoux.com

Gloomy Glens

Within the width of Irish and Scottish spaces, it is possible to live the uncanny experience of a lack of temporality, provided you let yourself be pushed around by the surroundings. The boldness of some wild places only permits silence, matching the smell of rotten barley. There, time seems not to have flown for centuries, only the spirit of the Highlander lingers, and the Hermit may still be hiding in the darkness of his cave, watching over the nest in the palm of his hand. If you let the spooky landscapes guide you, you will wander in a pleasant alternation of density and emptiness of spaces. There arises a peculiar informality from the bitterness of the air and the peaceful contemplation of the forests and moors. The scenery is a gigantic and verdant gash, and this is through gaps that the sunlight shreds the clouds. A certain state of mind is required, and if you roam the valleys for a long time, your feet wet with dew and with a misty mind, you could easily figure out the psychological condition of an Earnshaw, a Linton or an Heathcliff.

— Charles Roux, Paris

August 14, 2014July 27, 2014

Lauren R. Howe

www.LaurenRHowe.PhotoShelter.com

Two years ago, when the light was too bright to make landscape images, I pointed my camera down at an undistinguished area of the ground that captured my eye. It was not in any way a scenic area. It was small and it was somewhere easily overlooked, but to me it was a unique image that reflected my training as a painter and my love of the distinct qualities that a camera is able to record.

I have been making these images of the ground ever since, un-cropped and subject un-manipulated by me. I take them in disparate places: I find subjects in the flattened leaves of parking lots, in the tiny plants that live on beach mist, in the parched tilled cornfields near where I live in Rochester, NY. They are always taken looking down, always of small places, always to me abstract and evocative. These three are a selection from a group of images taken after days of torrential rain on the red clay in Georgia.

— Lauren R. Howe, Rochester, New York, USA

August 11, 2014July 27, 2014

Eileen Keator

www.EileenKeator.com

My interest in this series, About the Weather, developed naturally while photographing in Colorado and observing weather as an element that has repeatedly tested our ability to control the natural world around us. Our use and enjoyment can sometimes have unpredictable outcomes. I have fond memories of Florida summers watching storms under a veranda with my parents sipping cocktails. There were even hurricane parties. The themes of weather as recreation, how we like to play with and enjoy the elements – skiing, boating, swimming, surfing, and just watching — and photographing — can very quickly turn dangerous. There have been a number of times while being outside during various activities, whether hiking after dark or in a storm, or skiing when bad weather hits that I have felt that “what have I gotten myself into” feeling. It is the feeling of edging into something from which there is no return. After Hurricane Sandy I wandered the powerless streets of lower Manhattan and thought about how much we feel in power to control weather for our own use — perhaps it is more passive such as having waterfront properties or more aggressive activities such as snowmaking, surfing in storms. I see it as a power struggle between man and nature and nature ultimately wins with sometimes devastating consequences. I prefer to stay on the line of safety but am intrigued by that boundary and like to edge forward to take a closer look, where boundaries between enjoyment and danger are constantly shifting.

— Eileen Keator, Littleton, Colorado, USA