Willson Cummer – Page 39 – New Landscape Photography

The merry-go-round is a human element that generates color, noise and movement, producing a total contrast with the peacefulness of the surrounding woods. Things get really attractive when dark, silence and absence bring to zero these two worlds of separation. After 7 p.m the recreational finds itself in the natural, and vice-versa; the two things eclipse themselves in the only possible moment of the day. Walking around the park during the day, looking for peace and silence, you get inevitably disturbed by acoustic and color pollution, people yelling. These images tell us about the moment when these two elements, “the disturbing object” and the surrounding environment, interact without problems.

Mute is probably the word that better summarizes this work, it reminds of “mutation” but at the same time is a word that belongs to consumer technology, televisions, radio, etc. It’s used to have silence.

— Tommaso Fiscaletti, Milan, Italy

October 17, 2013October 2, 2013

Jean-Philippe Gauvrit

www.JPGauvrit.net

Most of my projects are related to China, watching its economic, social and urban development, trying to understand this country and its people with my western eyes, tracking the promises of the future in the perpetual move of the country and its cities.

Pudong is the modern economic and residential district of Shanghai, located at the Eastern side of the Huangpu River. A few decades ago, it used to be a vast farming land, surrounded by water, whose recent modern development was decided and initiated by Deng Xiaoping at the end of the Cultural Revolution period, to become a flagship of a new prosperity era.

Beside the modern and spectacular landmarks of Luijiazi, the Financial District, like the Oriental Pearl Tower, the Jinmao Tower, or the World Financial Center, offices, modern and high-rise buildings have gradually replaced the old housings, farms and industrial estates, dismantled or pushed away to the periphery of the city.

The concept of this documentary project is to follow-up a few selected avenues, which are offering a variety of landscapes, to illustrate the modern conception of the city promoted by the Chinese authorities, and watch places still under evolution and full of potentialities.

I started with Pudong Nan Lu and Pudong Da Dao avenues, which are progressing in parallel to the Huangpu River, and are running across a variety of places and patterns. I am currently working on others avenues at the south and at the east of the District. Pudong Avenues is mirroring another project I am currently developing in Shanghai, in black and white, in the District of Minhang, and I am also working in several second-tier cities of China.

To describe my photography, I would simply say “Documentary Photography.” I have a deep interest in places, spaces, and territories, in one word, in landscapes, urban landscapes. I believe that showing where people live, work, and interact can teach us as much about the inhabitants as showing them. Improbable and ugly spaces, buildings, highways, bridges, factories, train stations and railroads, how can we explain that these places seem to run their own life, growth, decay or agony, in an apparent total independence from their designers or users?

I feel comfortable walking along these places, as I am also interested in visual emptiness, and in visual banality. Sometimes I am trying to capture some essence from nothing… Maybe am I simply documenting absurdity?

— Jean-Philippe Gauvrit, Shanghai, China

October 14, 2013October 3, 2013

Panos Lambrou

www.jalbum.net/PanosLambrou

When I go about my errands every Saturday morning I notice a number of vacant commercial buildings, which were occupied by a variety of businesses that have closed as the result of the economic downturn and have remained empty anywhere from six months to the present. The odd thing is they have been maintained as if they were still occupied.

I keep thinking about all the people that used to work there and have lost their jobs, the merchants who have lost their revenue and profits, the building owners who have lost rents and maybe are now unable to pay mortgages to the banks and the linked effect this small sample has to our overall economic troubles.

I started photographing the empty buildings in November of 2009, and titled the project Ghosts of the Economy.

— Panos Lambrou, West Orange, New Jersey, USA

October 10, 2013October 2, 2013

Gianluca Gamberini

www.GianlucaGamberini.com

Tokyo-Ga 東京雅 (elegance/order in Tokyo) is a series about the interstices that divide and connect each building in the Japanese capital. I was inspire by the Japanese expressions for space and nothingness: Ma. Ma is the “in-between” space, an idea of the interstice between nothing and everything, between nothingness and that which is. It represents the distance necessary for two bodies to operate in space. It symbolizes the two matching qualities of union and harmony.

Following this concept I created a series of urban portraits based on dyads juxtaposing opposite and complementary principles in neighbor pairs. In Tokyo, the roads are made up of houses that are very close together but do not touch. They are separated by a gap that acts as air space and anti-earthquake expansion joint. These strangely-designed party walls give rise to a host of obscure interstices used for such purposes as ventilation, air conditioning or for housing cables. And yet the gap between each building links the often very different personalities and backgrounds of the invisible occupants who live there at such surprisingly close quarters.

This distancing informs, without revealing them, two spheres of Japanese society: honne, which represents a person’s privacy, their real feelings, and tatemae, which literally means “façade,” the mask of public behavior and social obligations.

I investigated people’s spontaneous occupation of the doorstep, which lies between public space and the façade.

By using a view camera I have attempted to get beyond the ‘façade’ and catch something of that intimacy – to see the honne that lies behind the tatemae.

— Gianluca Gamberini, Paris, France

October 7, 2013October 2, 2013

Tom Ridout

www.TomRidout.com

The development of the Blandscape series started as a reaction to the rapid loss of farmland as a result of commercial development. The existing rural landscape was obliterated and in its place large formless buildings were constructed. A token of nature was offered in the small buffer strips at the bases of the buildings. Plants appear here in many cases as icons that signal the conceptual importance of nature while at the same time relegating nature to an insignificant gesture, verifying our need to dominate it. Ironically it is the disregard for scope and scale in the built landscape that creates such striking and banal images. Single plants take on strong figurative meaning through their isolation of form and color. The complete lack of human architectural scale combined with strict formal landscape principles elevates the visual impact of the scene.

— Tom Ridout, Acton, Ontario, Canada

October 3, 2013September 7, 2013

Ben Marcin

www.BenMarcinPhotos.com

One of the architectural quirks of certain cities on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. is the solo row house. Standing alone, in some of the worst neighborhoods, these nineteenth century structures were once attached to similar row houses that made up entire city blocks. Time and major demographic changes have resulted in the decay and demolition of many such blocks of row houses. Occasionally, one house is spared — literally cut off from its neighbors and left to the elements with whatever time it has left.

My interest in these solitary buildings is not only in their ghostly beauty but in their odd placement in the urban landscape. Often three stories high, they were clearly not designed to stand alone like this. Many details that might not be noticed in a homogenous row of twenty attached row houses become apparent when everything else has been torn down. And then there’s the lingering question of why a single row house was allowed to remain upright. Still retaining traces of its former glory, the last house standing is often still occupied.

— Ben Marcin, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

September 30, 2013September 8, 2013

Paul Alexander Knox

SEPT 30 Paul Alexander Knox

www.PaulAlexanderKnox.com

The Space Between explores the different phases of social housing and regeneration via compulsory purchase order sites. Homes were demolished to make way for a new wave of regeneration to come. The collapse of the market has left these areas as liminal spaces, spaces between. I have photographed the remnants and marks left on the land where homes previously stood highlighting the once vital infrastructure that now stand as odd objects separated from function.

Social housing was built to house the working class, creating thriving communities constructed around an industrial heart. During the early Thatcher years those community members were given an opportunity to own their homes through a statutory right to buy, with discounts beyond their wildest dreams. 1.6 million council properties became private homes. Simultaneously the industries began to close down, splintering the communities, turning neighbourhoods into “council estates” dotted with privately owned homes. The estates became rife with unemployment and “antisocial behaviour,” leaving the homeowners to watch the slow decline of the community. The economic prosperity of the new millennium found these estates out-dated and over-run with social ills yet positioned on prime real estate. They were eyed for higher value regeneration, the council tenants were rehoused and the homeowners given CPOs. Not all home owners, many now retired, were willing to sell their homes for the dramatically reduced rates offered. The demolition of the vacated council homes began around them. The collapse of the market stalled this process leaving many proud homeowners with their spruced-up houses isolated and often attached to derelict and dilapidated shells.

The issues that led to the breakdown of communities have not been addressed: unemployment continues to rise and the “antisocial” have been moved on to other estates. The future of social housing is uncertain, as is the future of these spaces; the spaces between.

— Paul Alexander Knox, Gateshead, United Kingdom

September 26, 2013September 4, 2013

Alex Howard

www.Alex-Howard.co.uk

The Ditch is a survey of a small area (approximately 9 acres) of land in the midst of development, photographed over an extended period of time; an exploration of the photographer’s potential role as archaeologist through the study of excavations and analysis of physical traces left on the landscape.

Although the development is mainly away from street frontage, the area is not archaeologically sterile. Previous archaeological interventions have revealed that the meadow is generally characterised by worked soils with only sparse evidence for occupation; medieval and later landscaping, backfilling and dumping.

Walking The Ditch I often encounter discarded materials; the foremost signs of a human presence besides the marks of machinery. These photographs call into question our complex relationship to the landscape; why is it that we examine remnants of the past with fascination, yet disregard present-day development and dumping as an eyesore; at what point does our detritus become artefact ?

Alex Howard, Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, United Kingdom

September 23, 2013September 4, 2013

John Toohey

www.JohnToohey.net

The Doĝu Ekspres — the Eastern Express — winds through Turkey from Istanbul to Kars, near the border with Armenia. Without any delays it takes 36 hours — though everyone expects it to be more like two days. Geographically, it leaves the Marmara Plain, rises up to the Anatolian Plateau, enters the eastern mountain ranges and ends up on the edge of the steppe that spreads to Siberia. Culturally it is a journey through Turkey’s complex social diversity and its history as well. It leaves the modern industrialization of Istanbul for large scale agriculture and ends up in a part of the world where ancient farming methods are still practiced if not preferred. Scattered along the way are the remains various empires and cultures have left as signs they once claimed territory as theirs: Greek, Roman, Seljuk, Ottoman, Armenian and Russian. It is a part of the world where every square metre has been fought for, brought under control and often as not abandoned.

— John Toohey, Montreal, Canada

September 19, 2013September 4, 2013

Larry Torno

www.LarryTornoPhoto.com

Letterbox is a collection of panoramic photos reminiscent of the cinematic formatting of large screen imagery. By purposefully placing black bars at the top and bottom of each photograph, I’m making the statement that this is the original intention of the composition.

The Letterbox images take on the look and feel of Hollywood movie sets, often void of any characters, but left wide open for interpretation and the viewer’s imagination. We surmise that these photos have been taken prior to or just after an event. The blank scenes invite audience participation and encourage scrutiny of details in search of a plot or sequence of action.

Getting an audience to stop, examine and interact with  my photographs has always been a priority in presenting my art. I recall a college professor from many years ago who would project a photographic portrait of someone we’ve never seen before and say “Tell me everything we know about this person.” It was an excellent experiment to teach us to look for clues, hints, details, backgrounds, moods or emotions in a photo and translate those observations into words.

— Larry Torno, University City, Missouri, USA