Work I Like – Page 44 – New Landscape Photography

I am drawn to desolate land and seascapes. For me, making images is a meditation of sorts, a search for truth. While I am intrigued by the formal qualities of the areas I photograph, there’s something about shooting in the land and sea that releases my innermost thoughts and somehow transfers them to my photographs.

In this digital world, I remain a purist. I shoot black & white film and print my images in my darkroom. I primarily shoot infrared; I appreciate the way it appears to turn the world inside out, as well as expose what the naked eye cannot see.

Point Lobos & Beyond began in May 2010, when I made images in California for the first time. During that trip, I learned that I could stay at Bodie House. That moment changed my life, photographically speaking.

Since my early days of photography, I had dreamed about shooting in Carmel, specifically at Point Lobos, where the masters who inspired me did. I spent two days there, photographing and immersing myself in everything Weston. I even got to go in Edward/Kim’s darkroom.

As I was shooting in Point Lobos, I could almost feel the spirit of Edward Weston guiding me, and I suddenly realized that I had found the place that I truly connected with. Making photographs there had a profound effect on me and changed who I was as a photographer.

In spite of the fact that I was drawn to Point Lobos by Edward Weston’s images, my images are about my spiritual journey. This body of work is ongoing and I’m still not entirely sure where it will take me.

At this point, the images are about exploring Point Lobos, and other areas in Northern/Central California, from the ground on up and beginning to understand what it is that I have always been looking for.

My search for answers continues. I recently returned to Point Lobos and am just in the early stages of printing the new images. My concept will continue to grow and take shape as I learn more about these images during the printing process

— Kimberly J. Schneider, New York City

May 20, 2013May 20, 2013

Alon Koppel

MAY 20 Alon Koppel

www.NotLikeHere.org

A quiet, subdued anthropological look into the tension on the surface of the earth, and the constant struggle between nature and humans. The boundaries we lay down, when, where and why and happens to them over time.

The photos observe places and spaces. Between what appears, what’s not there yet and what disappears. I seek a simple description of life with these photos. And even though the moment captured looks like it can be captured again, it will never be the same.

I was always interested in photographing physical and virtual borders – the space between us and our surroundings – and what we do to those locations. The photographs often manifest that by showing subtle ecological issues. Things most other people walk or drive by without care or notice.

— Alon Koppel, Red Hook, New York, USA

May 16, 2013April 24, 2013

Brooke White

www.BrookeCWhite.net

Over the past decade my major works completed, which include large-scale photographs and non-narrative films, investigate how globalization and technology effect our connection and disconnection to the landscape and place. The New South Project investigates the ways in which the global economic market and technology has distanced our connection to place thereby creating a radical form of displacement to landscapes in the global south.

This project began in Bangalore, India, where I was a Fulbright Scholar in the fall of 2012. I went to Bangalore to photograph the changing landscapes of the city and the country due to the booming IT sector. This project has expanded to include the Deep South of the United States, in states such as Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, where the oil industry dominates. Each location in The New South Project is facing many challenges due to globalization some of which include, environmental degradation, displacement and political instability. The New South Project investigates how new hybrid identities and landscapes are developing as a result of globalization.

The images are coupled with Google map images as a way to investigate the idea of lived experience of place versus a virtual one. In today’s environment it is very easy to virtually visit anywhere in the world, but what does it mean to physically embody a landscape or to have a landscape or place embody you? This project tries to answer these questions.

Additionally, there is a Google map, which can be seen here, that investigates the concept of embodiment interactively.

— Brooke White, Oxford, Mississippi, USA

May 13, 2013April 24, 2013

James Kullmann

www.SometimesIWander.com

My project The City in Color is a sort of love song to my new home in the Pacific Northwest. Cities make for strange landscapes. Workplaces, parks and homes all swirl together into a pattern that is in and of itself a living thing. I spend a lot of time observing and documenting urban and suburban spaces. I’m drawn to scenes that present interesting juxtapositions between us and the land we live on.

— James Kullmann, Seattle, Washington, USA

May 9, 2013April 24, 2013

Fleur Alston

www.FleurAlston.wix.com

This project documents places with dark histories that are reflected in their names. I am searching for an echo of that past.

In exploring the concept of what’s in a name I want to see if that mark of history has seeped into the bones of a place. The use of long exposure flattens and alienates the images which I think somehow encompasses the feelings these places inspire in me.

— Fleur Alston, Maidstone, Kent, United Kingdom

May 6, 2013May 6, 2013

Kalo Vicent

www.KaloVicent.com

I always work from an intimate perspective.

The industrial areas are a constant in my walks, especially after working hours. I also explore winter resort areas and abandoned fields. I’m interested in the disappearance of the functionality of the site, and the appearance of its genuine essence, the ancestor of the territory that not so long ago was wild.

In my photographs I try to capture this transformation and the resulting entropic energy.

This project, Around the Factory, shows the inhospitable nature of our industrial areas and the failure of urbanized industrial society. The project also questions the status and depressing aesthetics of these areas where man goes daily to his job.

We can see from the photographs that there are plants: unemployed, hopeless, maintained by the system or function in a representative of the company, or demonstrate against their environment. Ironically, in the photos appear plants as allegory and representation of the roles of human beings in these — our areas of work.

— Kalo Vicent, Valencia, Spain

May 2, 2013May 3, 2013

Alessandro Ciccarelli

www.AlessandroCiccarelli.com

The Western world gives dark and negative connotations to the word “wild.” It rejects it.  On the contrary, wilderness is a return to primitive harmony that is the most resistant nerve.

This project is the calm attempt to represent an emotional etymology of the author’s wild side. It’s about the images of an instinct, a trace of an exploration and the resulting sensations.

 They are all frames of a mental and physical ecosystem to recompose from founding elements, evoked by a human representation. It is on the film and its colors that we can find the idea of water, air, earth and fire, but not into the portrayed reality, because this it is not immediately accessible.

The wild side, the inner one, includes, at varying doses, chaos, eros, all taboos and a sense of the unknown. It is the joint realm of the demonic and ecstatic, of the archetypal power, where the engines of teaching and changing — elements of an overwhelming power — originate.

 Returning to the wild is an inner practice which, everything taken into consideration, is unseemly in our time. Its investigation is a risk that not many are willing to take.

— Alessandro Ciccarelli, Rome, Italy

April 29, 2013April 29, 2013

Danilo Palmisano

www.DaniloPalmisano.MonkeyPhoto.org

This work explores private memories about my homeland, mythical memories about my childhood’s fantastic world. An abandoned land: dream is the only way to approach it. A out-of-focus world where human presence is nearly absent and everything leads to a past no longer considered important. Every house, every landscape is suspended between past and present.

— Danilo Palmisano, Rome, Italy

April 25, 2013April 24, 2013

Michael Winters

www.MichaelWintersArt.com

Deeper into the Presence is a series of photographs made within the Red River Gorge geological area of Kentucky. The series title and approach to photographing this landscape was inspired by Kentucky author Wendell Berry’s description of the photographic artist in his book The Unforeseen Wilderness. The book, tag-teamed with photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, focused on the need to protect the Red River Gorge as wilderness in a time when it was under the threat of being dammed and flooded.

Of the photographic artist’s journey, Berry writes, “It is an endless quest, for it is going nowhere in terms of space and time, but only drawing deeper into the presence, and into the mystery, of what is underfoot and overhead and all around. Its grace is the grace of knowing that our consciousness and the light are always arriving in the world together.”

This series of photographs is my attempt to draw “deeper into the presence” of this intricate place. The grids of images are my attempts to catalog the density and diversity of textures found on these rock walls. The individual rectangles are captured in camera separately, then arranged digitally and printed as a single image.

— Michael Winters, Louisville, Kentucky, USA

April 22, 2013April 3, 2013

Bryan Steiff

www.TheArtNerd.com

Wind is a photographic project that examines and documents the burgeoning infrastructure for producing wind energy in the United States. A dramatic surge in construction of massive wind farms, small commercial applications, and emerging residential use of energy generating wind turbines, is creating changes in the landscape in profound ways. Whether viewing the high-density installations engaging the landscape like gigantic sculptural interventions, or the smaller commercial and residential fixtures that speak of practicality and environmental concerns, the turbines inevitably ask us to re-address our visual experience of the landscape. These dramatic symbols of renewable resources and green technology vividly evidence the hand of man on the landscape in a way not seen since the massive post World War II infrastructure development.

— Bryan Steiff, Chicago, Illinois, USA