Work I Like – Page 28 – New Landscape Photography

Drake’s Folly is a photographic book focusing on the oil region of Pennsylvania, and particularly the town of Titusville, where in 1859 Colonel Edwin Drake drilled the well that started the modern oil industry.

I journeyed through the region in search of hints to the past boom in oil production and the vast infrastructure that once dominated the landscapes. I was keen to see how the region has fared since the oil industry began to focus its attention elsewhere in America.

After the emergence of stories of a black liquid which was seeping from the ground, the then-fledgling Seneca Oil Company sent Col. Edwin Drake in search of this elusive substance. After much frustration and ridicule, on the 27th of August 1859 and at a depth of 69.5 feet, Drake made a discovery that would change the planet forever.

Unbeknown to him, Drake had made a discovery that would not only illuminate peoples’ homes but also radically transform the evolution of human civilisation.

— Dan Mariner, London, England

January 12, 2015January 5, 2015

Paolo Fusco

PaoloFusco.com

INSULAE is a project aimed at describing the search for isolation that the walls built around the new buildings of the new Roman suburbs represent.

 While in various parts of Europe new ideas in shared housing are being built, in Rome the goal seems to be to close citizens behind walls which separate them and keep others away.

These photos were taken in the suburbs of Rome, built in the last decade with little public coordination and supervision, in an incoherent urban environment.

The only common feature of these new suburbs is represented by the walls which enclose every block and every building, and completely isolate the residents from the outside, in a growing climate of distrust and fear of the other.

This seems to me as a clear symptom of how the Italian society has changed in the last years.

— Paolo Fusco, Rome, Italy

January 5, 2015December 5, 2014

Thomas Wrede

Thomas-Wrede.de

For the past 20 years, the vantage point of my work has always begun with a deep emotional need to be linked with nature and the question of how this is presented within today’s media.

In the series Real Landscapes (2004 – 2013) I explore the boundaries between simulation and reality. The world is reproduced as a sort of model kit. Large impact scenes are presented on a very small scale. Images and replicas vacillate between the idyllic and the catastrophic. Using simple means, I create novel worlds of imagery that exist exclusively through photography, by photography, as a photograph.

The ideas for my pictures are driven by impulses from the worlds of art and media, and I complement these with images of personal significance. I stage commonplace miniature toy models into real landscapes: on North Sea beaches, in coal dumps, and on garbage heaps.

— Thomas Wrede, Münster, Germany
translation by Stephanie Klco Brosius

December 29, 2014December 5, 2014

Jason Brown

JasonMBrown.ca

These photographs are part of a series entitled Alone Together, which tells the story of the expansion of Highway 69 in Ontario, Canada.

I have been travelling along Highway 69 for as long as I can remember. As a child, the highway served as a memorable – if otherwise predictable – stretch of road during family trips down to Southern Ontario. Today, I use Highway 69 for much the same reason, but travel in the opposite direction. Since living in Toronto, Ontario, my trips along 69 are now “up north,” and while the road still steers me towards my destination, today, it is far from the predictable stretch of highway experienced in my youth.

For more than a decade, Highway 69 has been undergoing a systematic expansion and widening from a two-lane highway to a full four-lane freeway. Alone Together looks at the natural, economic, social and cultural challenges faced in trying to expand a 75-year old highway along which both communities and nature have long settled. The series imparts views on the physical effects of the expansion on the environment and landscape, the economic effects on small municipalities, villages and First Nation Communities, and the social effects on both the local residents of these places and those that pass through them.

– Jason Brown, Toronto, Canada

December 22, 2014December 19, 2014

Harry Cory Wright

HarryCoryWright.com

Hey Charlie is a celebration of over fifty years of Harry Cory Wright’s involvement with a particular bend in a river and the field beside it. These joyful images are the culmination of a lifetime of experience of the place in which he grew up and to which he has stayed connected throughout his life.

The sense of the impulsive, and indeed mischief, is reflected in the title. Cory Wright calls his brother’s name — a child’s shout, an adult’s beckoning — to coax him into causing a stir in a place they know so well. They are allowed once again to be little gods. They create interruptions in the otherwise placid landscape; set off rockets into an evening sky; peer inquisitively into a haze of smoke creeping around a river bend. These striking and transient impulses, and the photographs in which they are captured, were intended to shake off the burden of the past and of nostalgia, and to provoke the making of new memories; to re-imagine, reshape and reawaken a much-loved place.

— Susannah Haworth, London

December 15, 2014December 15, 2014

Alexis Vasilikos

AlexisVasilikos.net

I’m only interested in what is here now,
and not in some theoretical abstract sense,
but in the most simple and direct way:
What is actual in the experience of this moment?
What is not conceptual?
And the reason for this is that I don’t have the feeling
that we have time. This is why I don’t want to waste any time
talking about the past or the future.
So what is here now that doesn’t belong to any story,
that is not a property of time?

— Alexis Vasilikos, Athens, Greece

December 8, 2014November 10, 2014

Pedro Arroyo

PedroArroyo.es

I’m interested in exploring the possibilities of the medium as a way to represent the passage of time and the changes in the landscape. I am very attracted by the power of photography to explain a concept without forgetting its evocative nature.

In Re-photographing Barcelona with Google Street View I intend to confront two archives of images. One historic, material and formed by the photographs taken by known photographers who have worked in the streets of Barcelona and on the other side another image archive, without authorship, immaterial and constantly updated.

As a result of overlapping both archives, we can show easily the evolution of a city and its history, the changes can be viewed more illustrative, but also represents a confrontation between the analog and digital photography.

— Pedro Arroyo, Barcelona, Spain

December 1, 2014November 10, 2014

Paulo Ayres

PauloAyres.com

Point your eye to the ground. Look carefully through the leaves, then you see some other color, a different color… a man-made color.

Camouflage is a ongoing series that explores man-made little artifacts mixed in the landscape. How long they’re there we do not know, and it doesn’t matter, because they’re already part of nature.

— Paulo Ayres, São Paulo, Brazil

November 24, 2014November 10, 2014

Ding Ren

DingRen.net

With a field-driven approach, my practice examines cross-cultural patterns at the junction between the foreign and the familiar. Recent projects Topographic Mindset and the waves would welcome it beneath the sea use analogue photographic processes to address geography, borders, and place in a phenomenological manner.  

In the mixed media series, the waves would welcome it beneath the sea, I traveled to Ireland in search of the sublime feeling of both beauty and fear that comes with standing on the edge of a cliff, overlooking something. I wanted to investigate geo-cultural patterns and phenomena within the landscape. I wanted to prove that these coincidental patterns exist and that rocks, no matter where in the world, form a solid cultural foundation. I made rubbings of the rocks along the coast of Nohoval Cove while also photographing the cliffs. By chance, the rock rubbings echoed the photographs I took and vise versa.

— Ding Ren, Amsterdam, The Netherlands & Washington, DC, USA

November 17, 2014November 17, 2014

Justyna Badach

JustynaBadach.com

Untitled Seascapes are themselves like the sea: beautiful and seemingly straightforward, yet beneath the waves there is remarkable complexity that forms what we see on the surface. Drawing on a series of Monet paintings for inspiration, this series explores our deeply-held desire to be the first to find a place, to experience a landscape untouched by others, to make it our own.

In the 1880s, Monet painted scenes of the sea at Etretat in Normandy, which had become a bustling seaside resort by then. In his paintings, Monet returned the landscape to an earlier time, removing most signs of man’s presence. Turning to this same landscape for her ocean vistas, I created a group of serene images, devoid of the clutter of modern-day tourism. Like Monet’s idealized landscapes that were created in the studio — often from photographs, I use Photoshop to paste together sections of sea and sky and erase beachfront hotels and tourist boats. The scenes are lush and striking, all what one would hope for in a perfect, unspoiled landscape. Yet there is something impossible about them; they are like paintings, constructed from imagination and desire rather than documents of what exists. The illusionary quality of them reminds us that however much we would like to find an unseen shore that we can call our own, someone has always been there before us.

— Justyna Badach, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA