Author: Willson Cummer

I'm a fine-art photographer and teacher who lives near Syracuse, NY, USA
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Alfredo De Stefano

www.MisDesiertos.com

In my photographs from the last few years, I have intervened upon the landscape, creating scenes or sets with a wide range of natural and manmade elements. In this way, amidst the sometimes oppressive vastness, I construct and photograph intimate spaces: some of them are metaphors for the painful desertification of the planet caused by man, while others work as ironic allusions to our relationship with the desert.

The action I perform deals with reintegration: it’s a reflection on what the desert has lost, but also a way of restoring its ravaged memory through a personal intervention. Obviously, in the desert, this intervention is something ephemeral, but nonetheless transcendent in the photographic memory that has managed to lend substance to a desire.

— Alfredo De Stefano, México City, México

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Céline Clanet

www.CélineClanet.com

Since 2005, I have been traveling regularly to Máze, a small Sámi village located at the highest point of the European map, far above the Arctic Circle, in Norwegian Lapland. There, I met quiet people, sometimes melancholic, captivating, who are very proud of their village and territory. They often have binoculars at hand, even in their homes, to gaze at these beautiful landscapes.

I have photographed Sámi people, houses, land and reindeer that were almost not here today. They barely escaped being flooded by the waters of a hydroelectric dam project that the Norwegian government planned in the early 1970’s and thanks to Sámi people’s protests and resistance was fortunately aborted.
But I have also photographed a reality that will undoubtedly transform in the coming century, due to global warming and cultural integration.

To me, Máze is an ambivalent symbol of resistance and helplessness. Pride as well as suspicion, solitude and great beauty prevail there. In the most beautiful tundra of the Arctic region, I tasted Ante’s and Ole Ailo’s favorite season, when days get longer and temperatures become milder. The perfect moment, when time doesn’t exist anymore and night is gone, when Sámi people immerse themselves in their favorite activities: fishing through ice holes in Lake Suolojávri and riding the snøskuter in the tundra. And all these hours spent with friends, family, outside on a reindeer skin, in a hytte or under a lávvu, talking, joiking, or lying down doing nothing, saying nothing. Just being.

— Céline Clanet, Paris, France


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Review: Looking at the Land

Looking at the Land, curated by Andy Adams

As Adams notes in his introduction, many of the photographers included in Looking at the Land grew up in the suburbs, and have little experience with the wild. They are the heirs to the New Topographics style of photography.

Many of the photographs in this broad survey share a similar aesthetic: straightforward images of a place, but often tinged with irony or humor. Adams has created an exceptional viewing experience: there’s a 17-minute video of the photos and also an online catalog of each of the 88 images along with interviews with most of the artists. It’s fascinating to navigate through the interviews, reading the ones attached to the images that catch your interest.

The exhibit accompanies a show at the Rhode Island School of Design that investigates landscape photography from 1865 to the present. While the RISD show will be up for only a limited time, Adams plans to keep his exhibit online indefinitely. Adams, who produces the website Flak Photo, has also narrowed his focus to images made in the 21st century.

Some of the more memorable images, for me, were Chuck Hemard’s photo of flocking birds on telephone wires, Eliot Dudik’s image of tire tracks in snow, Jennifer Ray’s placement of woven grasses in a field, Mike Sinclair’s Kansas City street scene and Sophie T. Lvoff’s cloud scene photographed in New Orleans.

I was surprised to see how many of the images were beautiful in a classical sense, rather than ironic. Lvoff’s cloud image, for example, shows a gorgeous orange and peach-colored sunset. Her interview confirms my impression: “The way the sky unfolds every day is unique and has to do with the humidity here — so I photographed the roof of my house and surrounding trees on my street during an epic weather moment. It’s beautiful.”

Rather than critique humanity’s interactions with nature, some of the photographers consider ways to improve it. Ray writes this about her grass sculpture: “I began to think of how I could make a model of this symbiotic relationship — how I could depict nature manipulated, but unharmed, by humans. I spent two days sitting in this pasture, braiding grass, and trying to find the right topography, form, and time of day. As a gesture, the braid is gentle and impermanent, undone with the next windstorm or downpour.”

The photographers Adams has brought together provide a more hopeful vision than was presented in 1975 at the New Topographics exhibit in Rochester, New York.

— Willson Cummer

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Dawn Roe

www.DawnRoePhotography.com

Goldfield Studies began during my time as artist-in-residence at the Visual Arts Centre of LaTrobe University, located in the Goldfields region of Australia.  The photographs and video works produced serve as a record of my response to the surrounding bushlands and the disparate histories that comprise this space. Though not always visible, the abandoned mine shafts that pierce these grounds serve as markers, unearthing a complex web reaching back to the era of the first gold strikes the region is known for. 

During my time in the Goldfields, I came to understand this space as repository of cultural memory constructed from the opposing perspectives of indigenous and colonial settler narratives, pastoral landscape representations, folklore and myth.  Confronted with this past, I found myself looking to uncover the poignancy of present moments, and the fleeting resonance of immediate experience.  My process combines a documentary approach with direct interventions into the landscape as well as constructions in the studio.  Deliberately clunky fabrications incorporate gold fabric and other materials that refer to mining, while also echoing the unsettling imagery of gothic fairytales that intermingle with this space.

While the particulars of location are essential to this series, the impetus for the work was a desire to reconcile documentation and interpretation. The layered narratives of the Goldfields, the palpable passage of time, suggested a rethinking around the formal language of the still and moving image.  I work with paired and multiple panels in an effort to deny a singular experience and to address the cognitive shifts between now and then, here and there.  Each view is represented as a distinct observation, emphasizing the necessary duration of present experience, suggesting that “your perception, however instantaneous, consists in an incalculable multitude of remembered elements; and in truth, every perception is already a memory.” (Henri Bergson)

— Dawn Roe, Winter Park, Florida, USA

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Book Review: Haboob

Haboob, by Andrew Phelps

One of Andrew Phelps’s most powerful subjects in his new book, Haboob, is Nothing.

Haboob documents the effect of the economic downturn on Phelps’s hometown of Higley, Arizona. The book’s title is the Arabic name for the seasonal desert winds that sweep through the region.

One of the Nothing photos shows the wonderfully-named intersection of Buckaroo Trail and Liberty Lane. The sign for Liberty Lane is slightly bent. The remarkable thing about the intersection is that there are no houses or buildings of any kind there. In the distance, we see upscale homes, but at Buckaroo and Liberty there’s nothing.

Another Nothing photograph seems to riff on Ansel Adams’s famous shot of a moonrise in Hernandez, New Mexico. Adams filled the middle ground with a small church and gravestones — signs of the life and death of a community. But Phelps’s moon rises over nothing — a pole and road sign in the foreground, bare desert stretching through the middle ground, toward a tiny distant line of green.

Many of Phelps’s photos document loss: a ruined palm tree, a fountain sitting in the middle of a large field of gravel. Other pictures show confusion: paint color swatches scattered on the ground, iron mustangs on a gate to nowhere, church signs and political signs in a desolate stretch of road.

Haboob is a beautiful and grim meditation on emptiness and destruction. The book is published by Kehrer Verlag.

— Willson Cummer

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Chang Kyun Kim

www.ChangKimPhotography.com

When I moved to California, I was surprised by the number of power plants and oil refineries that were adjacent to local communities. However, the more surprising thing was that many of the residents in the areas didn’t even know what the facilities were.

The title Intervened Landscapes first indicates the physical intrusion of the facilities into natural landscapes. They always seem to be eyesores but somehow are accepted and forgotten by people. More importantly, it also means some kind of invisible intervention that obscures our minds toward the whole energy industry, which can be government control and high-level security, or contribution to communities such as local developments that all have friendly-looking slogans.

By putting color palettes in front of the lens and blocking the facilities in the frames, I wanted to imply people’s view intervened by the industry’s secrecy and the forceful friendliness.
 
— Chang Kyun Kim, Los Angeles, California, USA

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Eldar Zeytullaev

www.EldarZeytullaev.com

Meeting Place. Basically, this place is in our consciousness. Meeting place with yourself, with your thoughts and stereotypes.
Images in a series, spaces in which things occurred, or could have. These are places with shadow sites of our consciousness. Having pressures or fears, not everyone takes a step to this place.

— Eldar Zeytullaev, Novorossiysk, Russia

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Matt Rahner

www.MattRahner.com

My photographs engage a space in time which is not day or night, yet not in the traditional sense of dawn or twilight. Rather, I work with the illumination of a perpetual, artificial gloaming. Making use of available light pollution I make exposures which capture a romanticized view of liminal space: in-between spaces which are characterized by their dislocation from suburban utility.

Although my subjects are ubiquitous and familiar they exist outside our periphery as travelers. Yet when lit with artificial light they are transformed and achieve an illusory, seductive quality. This seduction becomes problematic when one realizes that their appeal lies in the man-made byproducts of light pollution and commercialization. When my photographs are successful there exists a tension between what is beautiful and at the same time intrusive; this dichotomy is what motivates my work.

— Matt Rahner, Columbia, Missouri, USA

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Erik Sæter Jørgensen

www.ESJ.no

Hardanger is a geographic area in the Norwegian west. The fjords of the west are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Hardangerfjord is the third-largest in the world. The awesome beauty and the arch-typical Norwegianness of the region has made sure it’s been depicted more often than any other part of romanticist Norway.

Today, Hardanger is being destroyed by unrestrained capitalism and nebulous political forces. Under the guise of securing the power supply of Norway’s second largest city, Bergen, the government — through the state-owned company Statnett — has powered through the decision to build a new power line cutting through the unique landscape. In reality, the line is being built to provide the oil rigs in the North Sea with electrical power. This in turn enables Norway to shift a large part of its C02 emissions onto other European countries.

I started photographing the area in the summer of 2011, before most of the construction work had begun. A few weeks ago I returned to join the activists in their last act of civil disobedience. “This will never be forgiven,” said one of the banners. The line will soon be finished, but I will return.

— Erik Sæter Jørgensen, Stavanger, Norway

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Book Review: Where Will You Spend Eternity ?

Where Will You Spend Eternity ?, by Sylvia de Swaan

De Swaan’s photobook contains poetry, an essay, an artist’s statement and an account from a couple who visited Utica, New York and stayed with de Swaan. The book is a meditation on her adopted hometown, a small post-industrial city in Upstate New York.

The 84 photos included are subtle, building as a body of work, a visual poem.

Take this extended sequence: an image of a snow-covered back yard leads to a picture of a snow-covered statue of Jesus, then a picture of a yellow ribbon in a wintry yard. Next we see a pattern of snow on paving stones — broken very faintly by one person’s footsteps. The series continues with a snowy scene of a house with a large peace symbol spray-painted on its door, and the word “peace” written on the front of the house.

De Swaan continues this riff with an image of a garage painted with the words “world peace in the streets.” Someone has spray-painted a thin black line through the phrase — still leaving it entirely legible. On the facing page is a bullet hole in a window. Turn the page and see blacktop with two figures painted onto it, appearing to walk toward each other. The final image in this series is a boarded-up house with the words “peace in the streets” painted on it. This time none of the words are crossed out.

While many of the photos portray a gloomy rust-belt landscape, de Swaan includes signs of hope: the Cambodian Buddhist procession, the painted wall with an image of Martin Luther King, Jr., the freight train with the words “No Remorse !” painted onto it. She also creates humor, as when she pairs a trailer with an image of a slumbering woman opposite a shot of a McDonald’s sign urging us to “Wake up Happy.”

De Swaan’s book title asks about eternity, but the photographer is fascinated by the details of the here and now — how we live out our days — whether at war or at peace, in wealth or poverty, alone or together.

Where Will You Spend Eternity ? was self-published, and is available through Blurb.

— Willson Cummer