Willson Cummer – Page 53 – New Landscape Photography

The End of Summer is a series of photographs taken in or around White Lake, Michigan, where I spent my childhood summers staying with my grandparents. These photos are a visual commentary about what it is like to go back to a place that holds significant memories and experiences. Although it is often said that one can never truly “go home,” I wanted to go back to try to capture some of the memories that shaped me and still serve as inspiration to me. I wanted to capture the bright green trees, the ear-ringing silence, the pitch-black nights, the warm lake water, and the freshly-cut grass. Although many of these memories do not have a direct visual representation, this body of work focuses on small details to evoke a sense of place.

— Stephanie Penn, Alameda, California, USA

August 16, 2012August 20, 2012

Godo Chillida

www.GodoChillida.com

Aquatic City is built by liquid images from Barcelona, Spain. Reflections from buildings, people, vegetation and different objects projected on urban puddles. Facing up to the panoramic touristic tour, sharped and stereotyped, the citizens of the city need to go all over the distorted map of the  everyday environment.

It is said that after the storm comes the calm, but the evidence of the passage of the rain is the puddles, ephemeral mirrors where the corners of the city are housed until the evaporation and absorption make them disappear.

This reading of the contemporary Barcelona is biased, diffuse and aimed at dissipation, as is her image on the surface of a puddle.

— Godo Chillida, Barcelona, Spain

August 15, 2012August 20, 2012

A Contest

I’m giving away a copy of my Parking Garages book to the person who makes the most interesting suggestion of artists to add to my blogroll, on the right side of the blog homepage. These are artists whose work I like, but whom I may not have featured with a photo. They are listed under the heading “New Work I Like.” Please scroll down the blogroll to see if the artist you’re thinking of is already listed.

Please send an email with your suggestions to me at: [email protected]. It would be great if you included the artists’ websites.

This contest will run until noon Eastern Standard Time on Monday, August 20.

You may leaf through the prize online here: Parking Garages

Addendum, on Aug. 20: I’ve picked a winner, Thomas Kellner, who introduced me to the gloomy, mysterious work of Marc Baruth. Thanks, Thomas, and congratulations !!

August 13, 2012August 10, 2012

Paul Kuimet

www.PaulKuimet.com

The photographic series In Vicinity depicts new suburban development areas near Tallinn, Estonia. Shot entirely within a five-kilometer radius of where I grew up, I have tried to document the results of the vast change from former agricultural farming lands to new housing developments in the 2000’s. I believe that upon close inspection this deformed landscape can reveal something essential about the culture that produces the desire to live this way. The recent economic downfall has, of course, left some people’s desires unfulfilled.

— Paul Kuimet, Tallinn, Estonia

August 9, 2012August 7, 2012

Fran Simó

www.FranSimó.info

Antiscapes are landscapes in anti-natural spaces but where you can recognize or imagine some natural elements almost without human presence. You can see solitude and imagine “what if those building were mountains?”

These places call my attention. I imagine a postcard, I see a snow cave where there was a car workshop, a lake where there was a puddle.

It’s some kind of double nostalgia because I’m imagining nature over urban-decay scenarios.

— Fran Simó, Barcelona, Spain

August 6, 2012July 27, 2012

Gary Green

www.GaryGreenPhotographs.com

Spanish Architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales coined the term terrain vague to describe the abandoned, ambiguous, or marginalized pieces of land within an urban landscape that stand in contrast to the otherwise cohesive, definable organization of the city. These kinds of spaces – abandoned lots, post-industrial sites, bridge underpasses, for example – define the character of a cityscape through these pauses and stutters of visual dissonance.

My intention with this work is to expand on Morales’s notion to use it with a bit of poetic license in order to describe a sense of longing I find so prevalent in these Central Maine landscapes. The empty storefronts, the spaces between modest homes, and vacant lots are for me filled with the beauty, despair, yearning, and disappointment that define this time in history in many places throughout the world.

In a sense these photographs are anti-scenic; they do not present us with beautiful or idyllic spaces. The images are filled with a sense of passage, decline as well as the ordinariness of utility pared down to the basics: the piling of soil, the scraping of the earth, the fencing in of property. Some of them are layered so that trees and brambles hide a home, a human story. These are the spaces we barely bother to attend to visually, all the more reason to give them further attention.

— Gary Green, Waterville, Maine, USA

August 2, 2012July 27, 2012

Alireza Mirzaee

www.AlirezaMirzaee.me

Every object stops functioning, is doomed either way: it is transformed to something futile or rubbish or becomes poetically significant. We are surrounded by electrical poles which connect wires and make telecommunicating possible. This leads them to act invisible and become banal; the actual essence of Pragmatism and Functionalism. It also removes the function of “things,” like words being devastated by meanings in routine language. Electrical poles do not work without wires though. They can both present deficit and castration. With eliminating function and attaining dependency, they turn into autonomous objects and reveal a total brand new meaning. (At this very point, a poetic order does not connect to elegant elements, it instead gets benefit from coarse and rough objects like electrical poles). So what is this brand new meaning? Facing cemented silhouettes and humpy wireless poles, you feel like they are absolutely lost looking for new identity. Sometimes in a poor situation and some other time with a threatening pose. What meaning truly haunts these objects in our minds? Disconnecting the wires, do they intend to display a situation after the catastrophe? Or warn us against the ghastly Real Order? Or stimulate our pity looking at them?

— Alireza Mirzaee, Urmia, Iran

July 30, 2012July 27, 2012

Carl Gunhouse

www.CarlGunhousePhoto.com

One way or another, everyone grows up believing in the American dream, an unspoken contract that if we work hard, behave ethically, spend within our means and put some money aside, we will be rewarded with economic security, a significant other and aspirations within our reach. A dream that has been augmented in recent years with the promise of smart phones, 3-D plasma televisions, eco-friendly luxury cars, and most of all, a new home with a sizable yard in pristine suburban neighborhood with good schools.

Consumption has destroyed the American dream and the earnest assumption that an ideal life is guaranteed by hard work, a college degree and playing by the rules. Instead we are left with entry-level jobs, no opportunity for advancement, no benefits, inescapable debt, and the cold comfort that we avoided a Depression. Our desire for something more has brought consequences visible in every corner of America. In these spaces, we can see the America we have become.

— Carl Gunhouse, Brooklyn, New York, USA

July 26, 2012July 26, 2012

Oscar Ciutat

www.OscarCiutat.com

The night shots in this series make up a singular portrait of Barcelona, although it could be any other city, because, at night and from a distance, they all look alike. When the sun sets, cities become large mantles of light whose contemplation invites one to imagine the private lives of those hidden behind them. Will they all share similar concerns, similar desires, similar fears?

— Oscar Ciutat, Barcelona, Spain

July 23, 2012July 22, 2012

James Davies

www.JamesDaviesPhoto.com

A feeling of frustration led me to take the photos that form Olympic City. Firstly, after having lived in London for over a decade I quickly became irritated at the way in which the city was being portrayed by the Olympic organisers and in the adverts of its sponsors in the build up to the 2012 Olympic Games. Any aspect of the reality of life in London had been completely ignored and instead I felt we were being subjected to a Disneyesque version of London. Alongside this the needs and the daily lives of the people of London seem to be wilfully ignored by those organising the Olympics, from the £9 billion of public money being used to build the Games’ venues to the priority traffic lanes for athletes and media that even ambulances won’t be allowed to use. The frustration of seeing so much get done for the sole benefit of people that will be watching on TV while the people of the city bears the financial and logistical brunt of the Games angered me. The final inspiration for Olympic City was the quote from Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, that I use as an introduction to the series. He seems to wish that fairy-tale vision of London to become a reality, but only for the benefit of tourists and people watching London from millions of miles away. Having lived in the city for as long as I have I could think of so many areas that opposed his fantasy view of London as an Olympic utopia. The main aim with these photographs is to show a small dose of the reality of London in 2012.

— James Davies, London, United Kingdom