Author: Willson Cummer

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

www.RyanKoopmans.com

Paradise Now explores how urban fantasies and construction function as expressions of nationalistic ambition, blurring the line between the natural and artificial within the hypermodern city.

Paradise Now is driven by my ongoing curiosity into the human condition, and a desire to visually interpret socio-cultural phenomena within both natural and man-made landscapes. I am drawn, photographically, to the world’s rapidly-expanding and hyper-globalized cities, particularly those that have invested heavily in large-scale urban planning and modernist/futurist architecture. I find that the topographically surreal environments that are products of that planning and architecture set the stage for interesting photo opportunities, from close up and afar.

— Ryan Koopmans, New York City, USA

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Joël Tettamanti

www.Tettamanti.ch

I went to south Greenland to visit my Danish family, to the city of Qaqortoq. The third largest city in Greenland, which is actually not that big, it has about 2,000 inhabitants and only some four to six kilometers of roads. You can’t get out from the city. You are really stuck there. In the winter you can only fly in with helicopter or come by boat. Every week there is a boat coming over from Denmark to supply the city with food.

Greenland has features similar to Switzerland: it is an isolated place, surrounded by mountains, snow, but then again it is a very different place. There are other mountains, other ways of using the mountains. Mountains are a problem to them. They almost fight the nature and climate. Houses need to be of very elementary architecture, few windows, good protection against the cold. Greenland is nearly an impossible place to live. In the winter it is incredibly cold and summer might be even worse with all the mosquitoes. I was impressed by the obsession of people staying in a place that is so clearly not made for humans.

— Joël Tettamanti, Lausanne, Switzerland

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John King

www.JCKing.ca

We mark the land. These photographs portray the Canadian Newfoundland landscape with evidence of human activity. Sometimes land is in transition, altered by the actions of construction. At other times land is marked to delineate a place that is important to people. In all of these, an undifferentiated wilderness has been changed by the imposition of a human order.
 
These images continue a long-standing interest in photographing the natural world and the intersection of human presence in the natural landscape.

— John King, Clarenville, Canada

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Michael Bach

www.MBachPhoto.wix.com/Michael-Bach

There is a palpable sense of sadness and despair felt when walking in the woods and fields of Mt. Ida, as if a dark veil enshrouded the landscape. While stumbling across remnants of failed lives and desperate attempts of domesticity, one cannot help to think of those forced to endure such hardship. In 2010, the city of Troy, New York permanently banished the homeless from the land. It was then that I chose to carry out the project Displaced, to be a memorial to the landscape and a testament to the people who called this place home.

In photographing, I was less interested in literally documenting what I came upon and more in the narrative contained in the personal ephemera, belongings, and structures for living. I wanted to avoid personal bias or the overt social and political implications of the subject matter, allowing the spirits of this neglected landscape to shine through. The photographs are intentionally left open-ended. In the end, the viewers will have their own personal experiences when viewing the work.

During the time I have been working, construction projects have threatened and overtaken portions of the land. I dutifully photographed what was to be eliminated. Presently, the construction of another building has eradicated the landscape once more. Eighty percent of what I have photographed no longer exists. This includes the landscape itself, as well as what was left behind by the homeless. I fear that much of the land of Mt. Ida will, slowly but surely, succumb to this conflicting relationship between man and nature.

— Michael Bach, Troy, New York, USA

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Natalia Pokrovskaya

www.Pokrovskaya.com

The edge effect rule in ecology: sharp edges between ecosystems are seldom seen, but in transition zones, called ecotones, where environments are more contrasting, biodiversity is higher.

The Moscow River exists “backwards”: the movement happens outside of it, the life around flows by, avoiding the river as if it were a heterogenous element built in the landscape. No swimming, no fishing.

This project, titled The Edge Effect, studies how that effect appears when people interact with the Moscow River. It’s at the contact points where this “biodiversity” appears — new, bizarre behavioral patterns and cultural strata, as if thrown out on the riverside by the current. Observing them, I see a bigger story — about how people behave encountering the unknowable.    

— Natalia Pokrovskaya, Moscow, Russia

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Ben Altman

www.BenAltman.net

I look for a beach, usually facing West, and set up my 4×5 or 8×10 camera, often at sunset. As the light fades, I make long exposures of the last few feet of sand, a few feet of water, and the shifting edge between them, allowing the motion of the waves and reflections of the sky to combine in unpredictable ways with the chemistry of the film. I crop the resulting images to exclude the horizon and to emphasize ambiguities of scale and substance, looking for effects that are both seductive and unsettling when printed at large size.

— Ben Altman, Ithaca, New York, USA

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Jeff Alu

www.JeffAlu.com

My style hovers between documentary and a semi-dreamlike state. I’m constantly searching for what I like to call “clues.” These clues generally represent the initiation of questions that should be asked, rather than answers to pre-defined questions. I never have a set idea of what it is I’m looking for. I simply seek, occasionally finding exactly what it is I wasn’t seeking. For me, that’s the time I learn something new about life: when I discover a new path, a new way of seeing, a new reason for continuing my search.

— Jeff Alu, Los Angeles, California, USA

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Will Davis

www.WillKDavis.com

Practice examines how the concept of place has moved far beyond a geometrical notion. Place can now offer us gifts of visual and textual metaphor to understand unconscious ideas about our sense of self and to deepen our understanding of our relationship with the external world. My work explores the nature of place, and asks whether there is more to place than a geographical location. It attempts to discover the role that transience, presence and memory play in this formation of place and the impact on our sense of self.

— Will Davis, Wivenhoe, United Kingdom

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Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman

www.Larson-Shindelman.com

We use publicly available embedded geotag information in Twitter updates to track the locations of user posts and make photographs to mark the location in the real world. Each of these photographs is taken on the site of the update and paired with the originating text. Our act of making a photograph anchors and memorializes the ephemeral online data in the real world and also probes the expectations of privacy surrounding social networks.

— Nate Larson & Marni Shindelman, Baltimore, Maryland & Athens, Georgia, USA

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Heidi Romano

www.TalesOfLight.com.au

Initially these images were part of a five-year investigation into the forests of the world. But over time they made me look differently, because behind their great complexity and careful composition lies a secret.

Photographically I have always been interested in time and how we perceive change. These images illustrate the change of light, the changing direction of the wind and the force of the weather. We see a forest and imagine adventures — dream of discoveries, secret paths, laughter, or playing hide and seek. Yet sometimes a small piece of information dramatically influences the way we perceive, the way we look.

When I took these images I had no intention of documenting a crime scene, but when I unintentionally did, the forest transformed into a dark, mysterious place that spoke of hiding under rocks and escaping the country, of police searches, sirens and helicopters.

In its silence I thought of loss, heartbreak, and the crime committed by a friend — father of a little girl and partner to my best friend.

— Heidi Romano, Maldon, Australia