Category: Work I Like

Posted on

Andrew Borowiec

AndrewBorowiec.com

For over three decades I’ve photographed the social landscape of the Rust Belt, America’s vast industrial heartland, which extends from upstate New York to the shores of Lake Michigan in the west and into Appalachia south of the Ohio River. The region has been in steady decline since the 1980s, when the industries began closing. The Great Recession was especially hard for Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, where I made these photographs. Entire blocks of downtowns were boarded up, factories were dismantled, and houses were abandoned to disintegration. People accustomed to a life of hard work lost their jobs, their homes, and their place in the world.

I think that my photographs are, in part, about the specific identity of a landscape — its topography, its architecture, its history, and the arrangement and decoration of back yards. At the same time, I try to make pictures whose details serve as clues to understanding the values, aspirations, hopes, and dreams of the people who live in that landscape. And setting aside geographical differences, the circumstances of the post-industrial Rust Belt reflect an increasingly ubiquitous inequality found throughout 21st-Century America, where most people aren’t as well off as they used to be, or as they would like to be.

My work in the Rust Belt isn’t finished. Even though the region’s inhabitants were instrumental in electing Donald Trump, their situation under his presidency is inevitably going to get worse. Despite campaign promises, jobs in the coal mines and steel mills are not coming back.

Andrew Borowiec, New York City and Akron, Ohio

Posted on

Adrien Blondel

AdrienBlondelPhotography.com

I went traveling with my camera, with the idea to explore the concept of depaysement, a French word that represents the feeling one gets in a different place — the feeling of not being at home.

Depaysement is a peaceful feeling, a form of distancing yourself from your surroundings. There is melancholy to it too, the melancholy of suddenly having no past, of witnessing a world that has existed without you and will continue to do so. 

I find it more present in the mundanities, where things that are so normal they should feel familiar suddenly have a layer of mystery to them.

Strangers walk by, feeling just as distant and unaccessible as their surroundings. The figure of the stranger becomes a statue, integrated into the landscape.

— Adrien Blondel, San Francisco

Posted on

Ariane Coerper

PhotografikArt.de

I’ve lived in Mannheim, Germany since 1979. I like to show my hometown and also some other cities in Europe in a different way. I have always been attracted to the architecture and the graphic aspect of the buildings, but also the landscape.

Mannheim and its environment have grown rapidly in recent years and are constantly changing. So I look with a camera or with a smartphone (as a sketchpad) at the different districts and try to document their change.

My photography is never purely documentary. With targeted processing I like to create pictures with a painterly touch. People are rarely in my pictures.

I love to slow down by taking photos and this usually happens best in the early hours of Sunday.

— Ariane Coerper, Mannheim, Germany

Posted on

Luana Rigolli

LuanaRigolli.it

There is a picture of myself as a child that often comes to my mind: it’s me on my desk, reading the very first rudiments of geology that the teacher wanted us to memorize perfectly. Plate tectonics, continental drift, volcanoes…I was only 10 years old, but I already loved that subject: the idea of something emerging from the center of the earth to its surface, bringing destruction and fear, but also new forms and strange landscapes, was fascinating.

I remember the first time I went to Lanzarote: the transfer from the airport to the little village of Famara is a winding road through a land of grey lava and black ash. I could only see the outline of volcanoes, no trees, nothing else: something completely different from the Italian landscape I was used to. I fell in love with it.
Here I feel a strange energy that distorts my usual rhythm. I want to believe that the volcanoes destabilize me because they open a direct line that runs from the magma to the surface.
 
— Luana Rigolli, Gonzaga, Italy

Posted on

Katalin Vágó-Lévai

KatalinVágó-Lévai.com

Bánhida as a Hungarian village was first mentioned in charters in 1288. Bánhida had a rich history during the next centuries. In 1947 it had been united with three other mining villages: Alsógalla, Felsőgalla and Tatabánya — under the name of Tatabánya. And so it became a part of a town, losing its autonomy.

In this series, called Houses, Smalltown, I’m mainly dealing with the marks of human presence in Bánhida, a kind of topographical research for ever-changing scenes of the town.

These scenes may not seem to be aesthetically pleasing in a common sense. They are unavoidable parts of our man-altered environment and include a lot of things that most people don’t even like to look at: poles, ramshackle fences, traffic signs, concrete, dirt road, sometimes uncultivated plants etc., — which I find really interesting and exciting.

I try to find a new balance, context and interpretation of these environmental elements.

— Katalin Vágó-Lévai, Tatabánya, Hungary


Posted on

John Brian King

JohnBrianKing.com

Riviera is a new series I photographed in the summer of 2016 in Palm Springs, California. I experimented with many cameras but finally settled on a Fuji instant film camera. I liked the way the camera goes against the grain of fine-art landscape photography, and it somehow captured the grittiness of the city without being too detailed and harsh.

Palm Springs is usually presented through photography as a place to relax and unwind — as a full-time resident, I chose to focus on the incongruous and decaying spaces of the bleak desert city.

— John Brian King, Palm Springs, California, USA

Posted on

Changes to the Blog

I’m a person who keeps cars long after the repeated repairs make it worthwhile. So it’s no surprise that I held onto the original design for this blog for more than six years. The theme was called Neutra. I loved its simplicity and clarity. The problem was that whomever designed Neutra decided to give up on it after about three months. So there were never any updates — not even accommodations for cell phones.

These days most people look at New Landscape Photography on their phones, according to the analytics I have. So it was critical that I adopt a responsive theme, which would adjust to phones. A particular frustration for me was the difficulty of reading the artist statements on a phone. I believe that the artist statements complement the work and add to a viewer’s appreciation of it. (Some disagree with me, saying that work should always speak for itself, alone — but that’s a topic for another blog post.)

For the last couple of years I’ve been looking around for a better theme and couldn’t find one I liked. Finally I checked out WordPress’s theme called 2017, which was released — surprise, surprise — just this year. I really like it, and have changed the blog over to it.

There are some big changes: the picture window has grown from 575 pixels wide to 740. That means that, depending on the proportions of the image, the photographs will be about two-thirds larger in area. The first image published at this larger size is my own picture of a small park across the street from my home. It’s part of the From My Front Door project, in which I took Henry David Thoreau’s approach to Walden and applied it my immediate neighborhood, using a camera instead of a pen.

Another change is that I dropped the right column, which had my picture, a search box, an email-signup box and an enormous list of all the artists I had featured. (Confession: I stopped keeping that list up after it grew over 300 names and someone chided me for its being unwieldy). I put my picture on the contact page, along with the email sign-up box. I dropped the list of 300 artists, and I’m working on getting a menu link to a search box (help, please!).

Things that won’t change: my commitment to sharing the work of exciting photographers, many of whom are emerging and early-career. I’m also determined to make the blog more international. I have so much enjoyed getting to know artists from Europe and the US, but I want to add more work from people in Africa, Asia and South America.

I continue to run a Facebook group that is also called New Landscape Photography. It has over 3,000 members and is an active site of discussion, picture-sharing and questions. I lightly curate the group, tossing out postcard scenics, pretty sunsets and the like. Watermarks are also not allowed. It’s a very collegial and polite group, which I am determined to maintain as it grows.

The transition to the new theme may be rocky. Please let me know if you encounter any troubles. Thanks for your readership and support over these past six years. It has meant the world to me. And let me know if there’s someone’s work you think I should publish.

— Willson Cummer, Fayetteville, New York, USA

Posted on

Gregor Kuhlenbäumer

Kuhlenbaeumer.de

German landscape has been cultivated for centuries: created through continuous construction, destruction, rebuilding, mining and recultivation. However, until the industrial age landscape changed very slowly. Therefore, it appeared static and stable in relation to a human lifetime.

Only the advent of machines allowed mankind to change, destroy and rebuild, heap up and dig out landscapes within years, just like houses. Landscape photography used to treat landscape either as constant, changed only through the influence of nature or as something new, the result of human intervention.

The project called B404-A21 describes a process, the conversion of the route B404 into the motorway B21 on a stretch of 1.5 kilometres. The boggy terrain impedes motorway construction. Hundreds of piles are rammed 30 meters deep into the ground, thousands of tons of peat, clay and mud are removed and again thousands of tons sand are filled up, levelled, turned over and flattened again before being covered with nets, native soil, grass and bushes.

Creeks are diverted, pumped away, canalized and renatured. A distributor road, a motorway entrance and exit as well as two bridges are built. And every hollow fills with water, reeds grow, grass and weeds cover every pile of sand within weeks. Birds settle in, are driven out, come back or not.

Whatsoever: an awesome undertaking, a new traffic artery, destroyed nature, lush nature, profit and loss, a heroic undertaking and a devastation. The project is ongoing, bulky, and the outcome is still vague.

— Gregor Kuhlenbäumer, Kiel, Germany

Posted on

Raz Talhar

RazTalhar.com

Within the last few years, nothing has made quite such a dramatic impact on the natural Malaysian landscape around me as large-scale land reclamations have done.

It’s been both fascinating and disturbing to witness how fast once familiar scenes of “home” have been transformed and or completely destroyed. For this to happen, vast amounts of sand have been mined, transported and dispersed out to sea and along coastal areas, creating strange new land forms where once none had been.

My project covers five active reclamation sites — capturing them from land and sea. I’m interested in how these manufactured forms come into being and the process of them becoming a part of the working landscape. As to whether they are truly successful in doing this or not remains to be seen.

— Raz Talhar, Johor, Malaysia

Posted on

Maxime Brygo

MaximeBrygo.com

Through the installation Pavillons et Totems I question our relationship with history and myths by exploring a little-known or evolving heritage conveying experienced or legendary stories that stem from the construction of a collective narrative.

Tied to the former Franco-Belgian mining region, my approach is that of an ethnographer of humble places. At the CRP in Douchy-les-Mines, France I am presenting a set of photographs along with a sound montage played in the art center space, forming an installation that invites visitors to consider various sites and plunge into the stories these sites echo.

At the edge of a forest, at the end of a road, behind a curtain of trees, monuments loom up like apparitions, many of them ordinary ones that speak to the inhabitants of these territories and open their imagination. Their stories can be heard, like “micro narratives” forming a discontinuous and digressive narrative that envelops visitors and stimulates their imagination.

By superimposing images of places and stories of inhabitants like a mosaic, I poetize spaces by opening them to a multiplicity of perspectives and voices. Through these micro narratives, I allow the inhabitants of these places to reclaim their history and the history of their territory.

— Maxime Brygo, Lille, France