Willson Cummer – Page 42 – New Landscape Photography

The landscape becomes an object for some, a place for others, and a spiritual being for many. The vernacular landscape reflects humans’ place, point in time, and creates a barrier between what is fabricated and what is not. Through most of human history, many have entered the Wilderness and romanticize its beauty, critique its relation to personal aesthetic taste, or are chased out by its savageness. All the while we are entering a place, which is defined by an idea that we created ourselves through millennia of cultural evolution. Cultural geographer William Cronon stated, “We turn them (natural icons) into human symbols, using them as repositories for values and meanings which can range from the savage to the sacred. What we find in these places cannot help being profoundly influenced by the ideas we bring to them.”

Like romanticized landscapes in postcards of Niagara Falls, silver gelatin prints of Yosemite, and tales of adventure in remote jungles in Africa, we have very similar methods in beautifying the human form. My project, Constructed Paradise, employs mannequins as a surrogate for mankind. Like the myth of a purely pristine wilderness, mannequins represent unattainable physical perfection in an unblemished human form. Embedded in both the Wilderness and the mannequin is an illusion of purity and perfection.

There is a disconnect between the human world and the non-human world. The struggle to understand how we as humans are compelled to coexist with nature today holds subjective but urgent recognition.

— Marc Newton, Savannah, Georgia, USA

July 19, 2013July 8, 2013

Ann Kendellen

www.AnnKendellen.com

While wandering through towns from British Columbia to Louisiana, I find myself captivated by trees. We take this living plant and carve, prune and decorate it. We also take the surface of an exterior wall and imagine the tree upon it.

The tree is a potent symbol. It can suggest beauty and happiness, protection and strength, or balance and healing. Individual trees represent very particular characteristics. The elm is intuition; the aspen determination; the willow magic and dreams.

In an urban habitat trees may survive and even thrive. They can spring from cracks in concrete, reaching up to light and life. In curious combinations, renderings of trees sometimes sit beside the living plant. Other times the painted tree is hidden in grimy alleys and parking lots. The tree’s deep relationship with us, like its living branches or sketched leaves, remains both real and imagined.

Ann Kendellen, Portland, Oregon, USA

July 17, 2013July 8, 2013

Brad Carlile

www.BradCarlile.com

Tempus Incognitus explores the transitory nature of modern life using hotel rooms in which time and space fade into one another. These images challenge our intuition about time itself and ask about the stories held within these walls. Think Edward Hopper interiors awash in James Turrell colors with David Lynch directing. These hotel rooms lack personal effects to invite a narrative.

Tempus Incognitus records the day’s transitional times and shows them existing concurrently. The Cubists painted individual scenes from several different perspectives at once. In this series, I photograph individual rooms at several different times of day from a single perspective.

I use a time-intensive technique that captures the evolution of light and emphasizes change in vivid colors. Multiple exposures are taken over two days and images are created in camera and on film with no digital manipulation. Each image is composed of three to nine exposures. Only the light in the room is used — no colored lights or gels are added.

— Brad Carlile, New York City & Portland, Oregon, USA

July 15, 2013July 8, 2013

Jeff Krolick

www.JeffKrolick.net

These images are not landscapes in the traditional sense but rather appropriations of the seasonal textures, colors and shapes from a unique locale — Emigrant Lake, Oregon. By squaring these elements within the camera frame, an order is highlighted which weds the local gestalt of a small niche of the landscape with the photographer’s search for a familiar compositional order or in rare instances his discovery of a previously unrecognized or unappreciated natural order.

I think of archetypal psychologist James Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code and his examination of the “innate image” or personal daemon as it informs our unique and individual callings in life.

As I was seeing and taking them, the photos were about design and composition, but from another perspective, were an unfolding theme, a very early chapter of which I remember from my childhood in Holley, New York. For several years, late into the winter season after unseasonably warm weather had melted the snow, I was six or seven and, wearing my grandfather’s fishing boots, would wade through the ankle deep water in an overgrown and untended orchard behind my grandparents’ house, fascinated with little scenarios of tangled branches, mounds of dead wood and sandstone boulders cleared and piled years ago. It is not too different from my experience, in many ways, of taking this series of images of this one particular location, an artificial lake which rises and falls seasonally, gradually, imperceptibly, flooding the riparian areas, creating equivalent (but necessarily different) gestalts to which I respond, when I can see them, by recording their image. Rather than viewing this particular manifestation of a creative process as sequentially related to childhood experience in a cause and effect way, it is personally and creatively more satisfying to consider both in relation to the currents and eddies of my own daemon which calls me to this task of exploration, looking and seeing over the course of a lifetime.

— Jeff Krolick, Ashland, Oregon, USA

July 12, 2013July 8, 2013

Douglas Ethridge

www.DouglasEthridge.com

This series, titled Waypoints, began with a simple desire to revisit some of the territory along the Pacific Coast that I had enjoyed in my childhood. Along the way, it quickly became much less about memory and much more about capturing the essential spirit of each random, unplanned stop along the way.

These waypoints are the record of my journeys.

— Douglas Ethridge, Tahuya, Washington, USA

July 10, 2013July 8, 2013

Jonathan Salmon

www.JonathanSalmon.co.uk

I am one of those lucky enough to have grown up in a declining, industrial Northern town in England, albeit one with a little notoriety, due to the containment of a curse word within its name. I have since visited, and will continue to visit, many towns like it. I would like to think that we are all shaped and influenced by our surroundings, however it seems to be part of the British DNA to be cynical about such places, and unless we are told something is beautiful, it is inevitably a “shithole.”

I fell in love with photography as it enabled me to make what I thought were beautiful images, and this is still what, deep down, keeps it so close to my heart. However, am I trying to capture something beautiful within something so often considered the opposite, to show that beauty and worth can be found anywhere? Or am I trying to look for beauty where none can be found? Do I love this Island, or am I trying to expose its weaknesses and strange principles? I’m not sure, but I’m enjoying my efforts to find out, so I’ll keep finding crappy towns to wander, and maybe someday I’ll discover the answer.

— Jonathan Salmon, Bradford, Yorkshire, United Kingdom

July 8, 2013July 3, 2013

Ricardo Kump

www.RicardoKump.com

The images in these series are an attempt to capture beauty in these places where industrial sites meet nature, the beauty that exists between the decay and the ordinary life. The aim here is to bring harmony out of an assortment of abandoned objects, abandoned places, natural and industrial landscapes.

Ultimately, this body of work is a meditation on the new Irish landscape, and more importantly, a foreigner’s impressions of this landscape.

Living in a new country and starting a new life, everything around me is inspiring, and photography is a way for me to keep my thoughts and impressions of the places I have lived.

— Ricardo Kump, Dublin, Ireland

July 5, 2013June 27, 2013

Brian K. Edwards

www.BrianKEdwards.com

Many of my images are motivated by an interest in social topographies and how these can be depicted visually; other work reflects an interest in architectural and urban subjects endangered by economic development and eminent domain. I am also struck by the often feeble attempts by man to circumvent nature or, even more amusingly, behave as though man and an always cooperative, controllable, and accommodating nature can work in concert in a sustainable and permanent fashion.

— Brian K. Edwards, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

July 3, 2013June 27, 2013

Eron Rauch

JULY 3 Eron Rauch

www.EronRauch.com

“The familiar as such, precisely because it is familiar, is for that very reason not known.” — Hegel

During the darkest moments after the housing crash of 2008, the lauded American dream of owning a home seemed to have died an unceremonious death. The talking heads on TV posed apartments to be a new, lesser dream for the masses. At the depths of the crisis, I happened to be living in an apartment in Santa Monica, California. When I first heard this pejorative narrative about settling for apartments it merely annoyed me. After all, I’d lived in apartments all of my adult life. So too, most of my friends, both in Los Angeles and elsewhere, lived in apartments. But after my initial irritation subsided, I started obsessing about the tangled texture of the apartment landscape that sprawled all around me.

Over the course of five years I restlessly wandered and re-wandered a ten block radius around my “Apartment Home” (as the sign that advertised for vacancies called the units). The apartment building landscape in this ocean-side town seemed designed to hide humanity. Deep and densely armored with stucco the architecture pushed the outside world to the edges of the lots. The ever-shifting neighbors were anxiously present precisely because of their absence. Their discarded furniture and housewares were the only hints of their fleeting presence.

The more time I spent wandering out amongst the apartment-scape the more clear my position as the observer of poetic nothings solidified. I could never know even a fraction of the stories happening all around me. But when the world seems the most scrambled, the camera creates a pause in my anxious searching. A pause to notice the small clues hidden in plain site about what make up a home. Like the end of a relationship, the landscape is forged of a simultaneous lack and overabundance of imagination. Under the camera’s scrutiny the most familiar places break apart and become increasingly alien. The most familiar places are often the hardest to see, but they leave traces projected on the outside world — a spiral of images that leads ever inward.

— Eron Rauch, Los Angeles, California, USA

July 1, 2013June 27, 2013

Samuel Burns

www.SamuelBurns.co

Through my work I seek to break down the interference of texture, visual noise, a constant which closely parallels internal muttering, thoughts we often find hard to escape. Utilising long exposures, often up to eight hours, I am able to visually average a series of events, the resulting image akin to aural white noise.

Such images do not represent place, not in the physical form at least. Rather I invite viewers to find their own space within each image. White noise has no message, it does not tell a story nor impose its agenda upon you. It is a place where one is able to compile their own experiences, to form feeling, without guidance.

— Samuel Burns, Sydney, Australia