Willson Cummer – Page 35 – New Landscape Photography

Between wild untouched landscapes and urban areas — or just residential areas, the limits are both marked but still non-existent as nature is everywhere. I use this limit, the area in-between, as a field of police investigation, seeing each area photographed as a potential crime scene spot.

Though Iceland is one of the less criminal countries in the world, where the police seem bored, criminal literature is prolific. That’s why I proposed to Óttar Nordfjord, one of the brightest crime-novel authors, to write a short story in connection with these places that seem so calm but…

— Frédérick Carnet, Saint Marceau, France

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April 24, 2014March 26, 2014

Camila Alvarez

APR 24 Camila Alvarez

www.CamilaAlvarez.com.ar

Photography was born looking in the mirror of figurative painting: the earliest photographers were painters who used the camera obscura to record reality.

Photography slowly became immersed in the positivist ideal of objectivity. However, in the late 19th century, some photographers who called themselves pictorialists, inspired by romanticism, gave more importance to feelings than technical perfectionism, through some imprecision in the images.

 My project, titled Still, was born from this need to paint with light. These are poetic images that ignore their connections with reality.

Usually, I take photographs in placid moments, during the holidays, as if summer could be eternal. In those moments of contemplation, I enjoy loneliness — that’s why the people who appear in my photographs are distant, and their bodies take part into the landscape. On the beach, their humanity is the same essence with nature.

— Camila Alvarez, Buenos Aires, Argentina

April 21, 2014March 26, 2014

Alejo Schatzky

www.AlejoSchatzky.com.ar

In the 365 Project I created one photograph per day. I don’t mean that I “took” a photo every day, but that I created an artwork each day. I used old photos of my own and some new ones I made specially for the project. In all cases the original photograph was taken with film (negative or slide). Then I made a new shot of the film using a digital camera.

At the beginning of the project I used to wrap the film into vegetable papers or things like that — in order to create optical distortions. Later I started to burn the film with fire and to use chemicals to deteriorate the originals. That’s how new colours appeared. The use of Photoshop is minimal.

The series itself proposes a timeless itinerary among places and landscapes that belong more to memory than to geography.

— Alejo Schatzky, Buenos Aires, Argentina

April 17, 2014March 28, 2014

Sarah Pannell

www.SarahPannell.com

For nearly two decades, my aunt and uncle have lived in Hong Kong as expats, so naturally it has always been a place I have been curious to visit and see for myself. When I eventually made it to Hong Kong for the first time in early 2013, I was struck by the varying nature of the landscapes I encountered — which contrasted greatly with my preconceptions of the city and its surrounding territories. At this point, over 70% of Hong Kong’s landmass remains undeveloped due to mountainous terrain and owing to the high population density in Central and the Kowloon Peninsula.

— Sarah Pannell, Melbourne, Australia

April 14, 2014March 26, 2014

Markus Lehr

www.MarkusLehr.com

Being fascinated by the ambiguity of our relationships with the city — its artifacts, its tools, its morphology and its topography, I seek out the forgotten, neglected places and try to read their stories: sad, amusing, beautiful and often very quiet.

I discover silent dialogues in these locations. Dialogues between foreground and background, between objects and subjects, between past and present, and, in the case of Berlin, between East and West.

My work is about celebrating humanity without the confines of having to show human beings. By focusing on the elements that tell the stories of our past without any true indication of time or place, the viewer is able to experience a world that is open to his own personal experience and interpretation.

— Markus Lehr, Berlin, Germany

April 10, 2014March 27, 2014

Mishka Henner

www.MishkaHenner.com

No Man’s Land represents isolated women occupying the margins of southern European environments, shot entirely with Google Street View.

— Mishka Henner, Manchester, United Kingdom

April 7, 2014March 21, 2014

Mikhael Antone

www.MikhaelAntone.com

A Sense of Place speaks to our hopes, dreams and sense of identity based on place. The childhood landscape generally is thought to produce a primal landscape that one completely identifies with — thus comparing further ideas of place in one’s future. When we are young we attach ourselves and become emotionally involved in these spaces. Places take on personality and identity. Memories get locked into these places even though they are of a different time.

In the series Sense of Place, I focus on the spaces from my childhood. I photograph them as I try to remember a different time and place. I explore that sense of identity and coming-of-age within a particular landscape. I look for the emotions in the landscape and explore how these spaces have become almost stuck in their own past.

The landscapes portray the inner landscape of place in society: old mills, churches, empty fields and forgotten landfills elicit an imaginary space of isolation and lost dreams.

I focus on the landscape of place or hidden spaces, the spaces where one may wander or hide without organized identity or to escape an unwanted reality.

I also juxtapose a few places that have no identity. These organized spaces without emotional resonance such as banks, cineplexes and a mall are reminders of a contemporary lifestyle devoid of personality to identify with.

Mikhael Antone, Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA

April 3, 2014March 21, 2014

Andrzej Maciejewski

www.KlotzekStudio.com

My photographic series Lisbon-Moscow presents 27 villages and towns in Ontario named after significant European cities.

I immigrated to Canada from Poland as a young adult and I have spent more than half of my life here. This is perhaps why I got intrigued by the names of the places, which came here a long time ago from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean — like I did, and got settled in their new home for good, so well that now some people don’t even realize that these names were not born in this land.

Names like “Paris” or “Moscow” seem to be the remnants of the influence which Europe bore on shaping Canadian culture. On the other hand, in most cases it would be hard to trace any connection between those Ontario towns and the old cities, which lent them their names.

Some of the places I photographed are just small villages, some are flourishing cities, but all of them represent very well how most of the inhabited Ontario looks like outside of Toronto and Ottawa. That’s Ontario countryside, Ontario suburbs, Ontario mid-size cities.

— Andrzej Maciejewski, Yarker, Ontario, Canada

March 31, 2014March 31, 2014

Misha de Ridder

www.MishadeRidder.com

Sometimes natural phenomena can become so estranged and mysterious that we are inclined to describe them as unreal realities. It might be the extraordinary shape of a tree, a mountain, a shadow, a cloud or the mirroring reflection of nature in a lake, but it is foremost the unfamiliarity of the natural aesthetics of reality. My works can be seen as attempts to capture these temporary phenomena and atmospheres of nature within the still medium of photography. By seeking for the absence of human intervention, by waiting for the climax of the temporal aesthetic and by pushing the camera to its technical limits my photographs become both exotic reports as autonomous artificial worlds.

— Misha de Ridder, Amsterdam, Netherlands

March 27, 2014March 28, 2014

Filippo Menichetti

www.FilippoMenichetti.com

What Remains is a project I realized in December 2012 during a journey along the west coast of the Jutland peninsula, in Denmark. The identity of these desolated places, suffering a constant depopulation from decades, seems to inhabit a suspended time, which rises from the monumental witnesses left from history: this is what remains of the Atlantic Wall, an extensive system of coastal fortifications built by Hitler along the European coastline — about 1,500 bunkers from lower France to the north of Norway. Inspired by the book Bunker Archeology, written by Paul Virilio, my journey goes over these traces, probing fragments of landscape: what is left is the vision of a possible balance between a memory of the past and an ever-changing present.

— Filippo Menichetti, Naples, Italy