Work I Like – Page 42 – New Landscape Photography

The images in these series are an attempt to capture beauty in these places where industrial sites meet nature, the beauty that exists between the decay and the ordinary life. The aim here is to bring harmony out of an assortment of abandoned objects, abandoned places, natural and industrial landscapes.

Ultimately, this body of work is a meditation on the new Irish landscape, and more importantly, a foreigner’s impressions of this landscape.

Living in a new country and starting a new life, everything around me is inspiring, and photography is a way for me to keep my thoughts and impressions of the places I have lived.

— Ricardo Kump, Dublin, Ireland

July 5, 2013June 27, 2013

Brian K. Edwards

www.BrianKEdwards.com

Many of my images are motivated by an interest in social topographies and how these can be depicted visually; other work reflects an interest in architectural and urban subjects endangered by economic development and eminent domain. I am also struck by the often feeble attempts by man to circumvent nature or, even more amusingly, behave as though man and an always cooperative, controllable, and accommodating nature can work in concert in a sustainable and permanent fashion.

— Brian K. Edwards, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

July 3, 2013June 27, 2013

Eron Rauch

JULY 3 Eron Rauch

www.EronRauch.com

“The familiar as such, precisely because it is familiar, is for that very reason not known.” — Hegel

During the darkest moments after the housing crash of 2008, the lauded American dream of owning a home seemed to have died an unceremonious death. The talking heads on TV posed apartments to be a new, lesser dream for the masses. At the depths of the crisis, I happened to be living in an apartment in Santa Monica, California. When I first heard this pejorative narrative about settling for apartments it merely annoyed me. After all, I’d lived in apartments all of my adult life. So too, most of my friends, both in Los Angeles and elsewhere, lived in apartments. But after my initial irritation subsided, I started obsessing about the tangled texture of the apartment landscape that sprawled all around me.

Over the course of five years I restlessly wandered and re-wandered a ten block radius around my “Apartment Home” (as the sign that advertised for vacancies called the units). The apartment building landscape in this ocean-side town seemed designed to hide humanity. Deep and densely armored with stucco the architecture pushed the outside world to the edges of the lots. The ever-shifting neighbors were anxiously present precisely because of their absence. Their discarded furniture and housewares were the only hints of their fleeting presence.

The more time I spent wandering out amongst the apartment-scape the more clear my position as the observer of poetic nothings solidified. I could never know even a fraction of the stories happening all around me. But when the world seems the most scrambled, the camera creates a pause in my anxious searching. A pause to notice the small clues hidden in plain site about what make up a home. Like the end of a relationship, the landscape is forged of a simultaneous lack and overabundance of imagination. Under the camera’s scrutiny the most familiar places break apart and become increasingly alien. The most familiar places are often the hardest to see, but they leave traces projected on the outside world — a spiral of images that leads ever inward.

— Eron Rauch, Los Angeles, California, USA

July 1, 2013June 27, 2013

Samuel Burns

www.SamuelBurns.co

Through my work I seek to break down the interference of texture, visual noise, a constant which closely parallels internal muttering, thoughts we often find hard to escape. Utilising long exposures, often up to eight hours, I am able to visually average a series of events, the resulting image akin to aural white noise.

Such images do not represent place, not in the physical form at least. Rather I invite viewers to find their own space within each image. White noise has no message, it does not tell a story nor impose its agenda upon you. It is a place where one is able to compile their own experiences, to form feeling, without guidance.

— Samuel Burns, Sydney, Australia

June 28, 2013June 24, 2013

Peter Croteau

www.PeterCroteauPhotography.com

Spaces of dross are the in-between waste spaces in the landscape. Left as a result of sprawl, these spaces are in a constant state of flux between use and disuse. I explore these mundane spaces using the camera as an apparatus that can reframe and order the world. Through my use of the large format camera I create images of dross that also function as markers of the sublime. In focusing on spaces of dross, but using my camera more like a canvas, I set up a dualistic relationship between earth and sky in order reference painterly representations of the sublime. This relationship speaks to a high/low binary that exists in the American landscape between spaces of preservation and spaces of waste, humans’ free will to shape land and its use, as well as the ideologies that define the way we understand natural forms.

Peter Croteau, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

June 26, 2013June 24, 2013

Sheri Lynn Behr

www.SLBehr.com

While shooting for my project NoSafeDistance, for which I received a 2012 Individual Artist Fellowship for Photography from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, I began to think more about photography without permission, and realized that while I was making photographs, I was being photographed as well. This is an examination of the ways we are all being photographed, sometimes even in the most benign landscape.

I now see cameras everywhere, often security cameras pointed at me. Sometimes outside, sometimes inside, often they even come with warning signs. I’ve chosen to point my camera at the cameras. No matter where you go it seems, there they are.

Smile. Or not.

— Sheri Lynn Behr, Edgewater, New Jersey, USA

June 24, 2013June 24, 2013

Eleonora Ronconi

www.EleonoraFotografia.net

Like most children of my generation, I was an avid reader with a very active imagination. I created stories full of intrepid characters and riveting adventures like those in Alice in Wonderland and Gulliver’s Travels. Amusement Parks inspired me to bring that world of fantasy to life. I could hear the whoosh of the wind, the screeching of the metal, and the kids screaming. Beyond all this, I discovered hidden voices, ones that spoke from inside plastic creatures, from giants who were asleep, and toys in a world of Lilliputians. It was also my father and grandfather’s favorite place, where we shared laughs and fears, the sound of the carrousel, my favorite cotton candy and enjoyed the last very second of those memorable afternoons. They both passed away when I was very young, so these adventures still resonate in my mind as a wonderful and vivid experience.

As an adult, I began to revisit some of these memories and parks, just after sundown, when tired families were heading home. The twilight brings an ominous feel to the parks and the absence of people opens a space for me to create my own stories. There is also a stillness that allows me to bring back my memories, and I feel the echoes of my childhood and my family, who are no longer physically here, but their presence is still palpable.

These photographs represent my past and present. Not only do they remind me of fun and fantasy, but also of fear and uncertainty. The empty spaces remind me of what I have lost, but they also invite me for one last ride, one last adventure… before the lights go out.

— Eleonora Ronconi, Santa Clara, California, USA

June 21, 2013June 5, 2013

David Kressler

www.DavidKressler.com

When I began making these photographs, titled Interface, I had been thinking a lot about issues of land use and growth. I became interested in what could be found at the margins — between city and wild areas. Not in the most obvious and extreme examples, but in the most normal everyday places, in plain sight. In this interface there is evidence of a dance where human construction invades and nature slowly returns. A subtle type of asymmetric warfare where the brute force of progress skirmishes with the persistence of nature. As I explored these in-between places I found views of seemingly preternatural artifacts and arrangements turned out by the fray.

In contrast to ideas of conventional beauty in the landscape it became an exposé of the insidious. This study also became an exploration of my own conflicted beliefs and values. In fact, we are all, in one or many ways, complicit in unbridled progress and growth, the consequences of which are becoming more apparent every day. And yet these places are still beautiful.

Nietzsche concluded that in order to decide if something is right or wrong, one needs to ask, does the action affirm life or negate it? To affirm life one must welcome it in its entirety, reveling in the painful and tragic right along with the joyous. To look away, to retreat into some other realm for false comfort, is to negate life.

— David Kressler, Brooklyn, New York, USA

June 19, 2013June 5, 2013

Jose Quintanilla

www.JoseQuintanilla.com

I have always been attracted by those small houses, accompanied by a tree and scattered across the rural landscape of La Mancha, Spain. Former shelters of farmers and animals, they synthesize somehow the relationship between man and nature, like a metaphor of our origin. This project shows a series of photographs that explore the dialogue between houses and trees, construction elements and plants, the fight of humanity against nature, and its integration into the surrounding landscape. Pictures of the countryside and the beauty of simplicity. For this project, I have been aging cotton papers of high quality, using traditional natural dyes and oxides, which, after drying, are printed using pigmented inks. The codes at the bottom of each image represent the compass coordinates of the actual location of each shot.

— Jose Quintanilla, Madrid, Spain

June 17, 2013June 7, 2013

Skyla Dawn Pojednic

www.SkylaPojednic.com

By traveling the New Jersey Turnpike often and noticing the visual complexities of the terrain, I set out to photograph the site-specific visual relationships created by nature and man-made technologies and specifically how one encroaches on the other. Through photographing sites visible via the NJ Turnpike using a 4×5 camera, I discovered the difficulties a photographer encounters when documenting certain locations. In many spots, warning signs were posted threatening jail time or fines on those taking photos or engaging in “suspicious activity.” During my time creating this series, run-ins with cops were common. While I believe my images succeed in highlighting the relationship between man and nature, a series which was simple in theory also turned into a political statement of what I could get away with as a photographer living in an age of fear.

— Skyla Dawn Pojednic, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA