Author: Willson Cummer

I'm a fine-art photographer and teacher who lives near Syracuse, NY, USA
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Roberto Schena

www.RobertoBeat.blogspot.it

The first time I went there I was seven. It was with my grandfather.

Afterwords, with my friends, by car, hanging out, stopping at old churches and pine woods, talking, smoking, arguing about the next direction to drive. We went there to discover hidden inns, unusual views, fresh smells of mushrooms and mildews. It was long time ago.

I think there is such a place in the memory of each of us. Something particularly meaningful. Maybe, not far from the town we live, a place in the suburb, in countryside, a road across the mountains. A “B” road near Genoa, for example. The route SP 67 runs from Apparizione, a fraction on the borderline of the town of Genoa, to Calcinara, four houses in the inland. Around here, “Dark Nord Wind” is the name given to the North Wind when it carries rain and storms.

I have been driving this road many time, from 2008 to 2010. I took pictures. Looking for what I left behind: bad weather, dark paths, shadows of old friends, blurred memories. I went deeper into the forest, descending paths, looking through trees in the mists. Trying to grab the mystery of a place I only found the uncertainty of a road still to be covered to the end.

“I’m running towards nothing, again and again and again” (Simonetta Roncaglia)

— Roberto Schena, Milan & Genoa, Italy

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Anne Lass

www.AnneLass.de

Schwinden is a photographic collection of dissolving places caused by climate change and human construction. Coastal erosion has dramatic effects on living space and human activity and is mostly caused through the intensive construction of the coastal line and the use of sand for building purpose. The work demonstrates the limits of our belief in the “manageability” of our natural surroundings. Furthermore it reflects on the nature of photography itself, since each picture contains a moment captured and simultaneously lost forever. Schwinden is an ongoing project begun in 2009.

— Anne Lass, Berlin, Germany

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Jessica Adams

www.JessicaDAdams.com

I use the everyday phenomena of light as a source material for my unconventional experimentations with 35mm film. For my ongoing Altered Landscapes series I photograph shifting streaks of light and then submit my undeveloped negatives to physical manipulations, like putting them in the laundry machine, soaking them in a lake and opening up the back of the camera to expose the film to light. The resulting imagery reveals surprising colors and lines that are inherent to the quality of film, and yet invisible without the manipulations. 

These projects are similar to meditation: the goal is to reveal the previously unseen in order to make the new light become a sort of consciousness. The practice of manipulating film is an effort at locating a phenomenological presence that can only be revealed through that physical destruction. The process and result of these alterations is similar to closing the eyes when in front of the sun; unexpected lights, colors, and lines begin to form within the subconscious.

I am fascinated by the way that light moves throughout the day, and how the effort of tracking it affects our understanding of the way the natural world operates. Shifting light can alter our environments, our moods, and our awareness of physical and mental space. By harnessing the ephemeral passing of light, the altered image becomes a unique representation of a singular moment in time, a one-time combination of light, color, and chemical reaction that can never again be duplicated, except through the photograph.

— Jessica Adams, Brooklyn, New York, USA

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Mark Brautigam

www.MarkBrautigam.net

Guided by the allure of the unexpected and the revisiting of my personal past, I began to make photographs in my home state of Wisconsin in 2005. Coinciding with increasing political attention on Wisconsin, I traversed the entire state several times over the course of five years. The image of Wisconsin being portrayed on the national stage was quite different than the one I had come to know over a life lived within its borders.

These photographs constitute a personal and unique portrayal of the state. They are steeped in unassuming Midwestern solitude, populated by timeless characters, and set in a landscape that is neither dull nor spectacular and always seasonally in flux. While these photographs may live within the stereotypes of the Midwest, they also confound them with a reverent and dignified perspective on the land and people of Wisconsin.

Absorbing wit, humor, melancholy, and irony, the photographs in On Wisconsin seek surprise in the familiar and familiarity in the new. The images transcend the mere documentation of place to become paragraphs unto themselves, countering the instantaneous nature of our era and inviting the viewer to pause.

— Mark Brautigam, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

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David Barry

www.DavidBarryPhoto.com

Catskill Mountains began as a seeing exercise. It must happen to everyone at some point, when you cannot see the forest for the trees — in the most literal sense, when you become inured to your surroundings. I’m not sure when it happened, but I have spent the past twenty-five years in the Catskills and I could no longer see the mountains — the very same blue and green landscapes depicted by the Hudson River School. The natural world described by John Burroughs. The mountains and their valleys are still there and I am certain they remain beautiful. I simply wasn’t able to see them in the way I wanted to – or in the way I could remember seeing them.

In an effort to regain my sight, I began with the hills, in the hope that I would see the mountains. Perhaps along the way I would also see a forest and its trees.

— David Barry, Margaretville, New York, USA

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Victoria Sambunaris

www.VictoriaSambunaris.com

My interest in the vast transformation of the American landscape has led me to travel extensively in my car for several months every year. The mural-size photographs that I make inspire awe and wonder over a particular terrain and act as a catalyst to an ethical need to penetrate a grander question about landscape. My process begins with an unmitigated curiosity inspired by research into industry, culture, history, anthropology, geology and ecology. I resist approaching a landscape strictly as an expanse of scenery but view it as an anomaly with an abundance of information to be discovered.

— Victoria Sambunaris, New York City, USA

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Aubrey J. Kauffman

www.AubreyJKauffman.com

I grew up in the industrialized northeastern part of the United States, where I still live and work. This environment has had an impact on what I photograph. For more than 20 years the themes of urban architecture and man’s impact on the environment has long challenged me artistically and intellectually. I witness this in urban structures as simple as building façades in a strip mall to the deserted athletic fields of parks and playgrounds. The resulting work, titled Urban Studies, is an interaction of formal and organic elements.

Through my viewfinder I organize these banal yet complex images, first as flat two-dimensional objects and then as a multi-layered space of visual elements. The intent of portraying the desolation and lack of human interaction is intentional, marking a direct consequence of this isolation.

— Aubrey J. Kauffman, West Trenton, New Jersey, USA

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Justin Fiset

www.JustinFiset.com

This project, called WLA, grew organically out of regular outings photographing near my home in West Los Angeles and eventually the greater Los Angeles area.  I discovered that I was most interested in images that had been made in alleys or similar spaces.

As I focused on these places I came to understand that they occupy a unique gap between public and private, deliberate and accidental; that their use or meaning changes in relation to who moves through them; that while they are places in a physical sense they are conceptually non-places, without names, left off of maps, etc.

This in-between status, or liminal state, is a concept widely found in myth and ritual, referring to moments, rites and places that are simultaneously loaded with potential and neutral. The threshold could either be a moment of transformation or one of stasis, as in purgatory, and gives such spaces a neutrality upon which I find their visual qualities are amplified.

WLA is an investigation of the fleeting, lyrical capacity of latent spaces, a catalog of the unanticipated interactions and harmonies that materialize in these spaces and the human urge to find meaning within them.

— Justin Fiset, Los Angeles, California, USA

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Kyle Ford

www.KyleFordPhotography.com

At more than three hundred years old, this tree stands as a sentinel, witness to centuries of development and change. Saying nothing of the tree’s intrepid strength as a living organism, this Majestic Oak still stands today for one reason: its aesthetic characteristics. Without which, the tree would most definitely have fallen the way of the forest once surrounding it. The Majestic Oak survives as a reminder of a decision made long ago to preserve a specific aesthetic. 

Eventually, the act of choosing begins a perpetuation; one aesthetic choice begets another, begets another, slowly defining a subconscious vision of what beauty is. Only the chosen are experienced. Thus, only the chosen can be remembered. 

This series, titled Second Nature, examines the way Americans represent the natural world through display. Within this series, decided manipulations like selective preservation and engineered wilderness act as a lens to explore ideas of mediated experience, perpetuated aesthetics, and transformative hyper-reality. This series is a catalogue of the varied ways we go about re-contextualizing the “natural world,” and thus redefining the way we perceive it.

— Kyle Ford, Saranac Lake, New York, USA

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Sarah Zamecnik

SarahEZamecnik.com

Town and Country exemplifies concise topologies that follow a curiosity for exploration into humans’s exchange with the landscape. In my work I look for images that contain a sense of balance and rhythm, that somehow incorporate the patterns of nature interpreted by human manipulation. These images behold a sense of place and order, and exemplify a backdrop of the American heartland.

— Sarah Zamecnik, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA