Work I Like – Page 45 – New Landscape Photography

Using the camera as a tool for recording sites, my intention is create documents that can serve as a collection or archive of places, as well as question the ways in which we experience landscape.

For this project, I attempt to de-centralize the tourist’s gaze on the city by traveling along the perimeter of Montreal Island, photographing the shores while looking outwards. While I escape to the outer edges, towards the horizon, the built environment remains in view. I observe that shores of the island are part nature and part culture.

Akin to a pilgrim following an endless trajectory, I used the camera as way to engage in discovery and contemplation. Installed on all four walls of a gallery, these large-scale images place the viewer in a re-contextualized island, eventually simulating my own photographic experience.

— Jessica Auer, Montreal, Canada

April 15, 2013April 3, 2013

Victoria Crayhon

www.VictoriaCrayhon.com

This project uses photography to document my text interventions on roadside marquee signs. The work addresses the effect of media and technology upon human desire.
I place phrases on movie and motel marquee signs, many of which I find through research but also in the course of my frequent long distance travel by car. I use my own sign letters, installing them while filming the placing of the phrases and then leaving the scene with words left intact upon the sign. Afterward I make my photograph of the finished sign from the sidewalk or roadside, shooting from the vantage point of the driver or pedestrian. I use a large format camera and make large-scale color prints as documents of the sign in its environment. The photograph becomes the sole remnant of the project as the signs inevitably disappear or are taken down.

In its brief existence, each sign installation is read by an audience comprised mostly of people in cars or by roadside foot traffic. The experience of the viewer seeing the work in the context of the outside world of roads, signs and billboards is important to me. I am interested in viewers encountering my work in spaces they expect to see advertising or propaganda. The text phrases are the voice of an individual, deliberately personal yet sounding mysteriously familiar through the fragmented vernacular used within the spectacle of advertising. I use language that references aspirations toward contentment and fulfillment linked to promises of desire and romance provided by the realm of commodity and entertainment. My texts are formulated to read as regurgitations of that, as though they are public diary entries pertaining to banal realities of self and relationships based on comparison with an ideal.

— Victoria Crayhon, Providence, Rhode Island, USA

April 11, 2013April 3, 2013

Ellie Davies

www.EllieDavies.co.uk

I have been working in UK forests for the past four years, making a number of bodies of work which explore the complex interrelationship between the landscape and the individual. Our understanding of landscape can be seen as a construction in which layers of meaning that reflect our own cultural preoccupations and anxieties obscure the reality of the land, veiling it, and transforming the natural world into an idealization.

UK forests have been shaped by human processes over thousands of years and include ancient woodlands and timber plantations. As such, the forest represents the confluence of nature and culture, of natural landscape and human activity. Forests are potent symbols in folklore, fairy tale and myth, places of enchantment and magic as well as of danger and mystery. In recent cultural history they have come to be associated with psychological states relating to the unconscious.

Against this cultural backdrop my work explores the fabricated nature of landscape by making a variety of temporary and non-invasive interventions in the forest, which place the viewer in the gap between reality and fantasy. Creating this space encourages the viewer to re-evaluate the way in which their relationship with the landscape is formed, and the extent to which it is a product of cultural heritage or personal experience.

The forest becomes a studio, forming a backdrop to contextualize the work, so that each piece draws on its location, a golden tree introduced into a thicket shimmers in the darkness, painted paths snake through the undergrowth, and strands of wool are woven between trees mirroring colours and formal elements within the space.

These altered landscapes operate on a number of levels. They are a reflection of my personal relationship with the forest, a meditation on universal themes relating to the psyche, and call into question the concept of landscape as a social and cultural construct.

— Ellie Davies, London, United Kingdom

April 8, 2013March 20, 2013

Mark L. Eshbaugh

www.MarkEshbaugh.com

 Through my fractured imagery I explore the influence of memories and perception on the state of the environment. The images create a venue for social commentary and the population’s “collective” memory.

Everyone views the world from their personal perspective, seeing their environment in a unique way. Any two people will recall different images of the same scene or event. My images serve as a metaphor to those landscapes seen by many eyes and varying recollections. The fragmented pieces of our communal memory of an event are presented as they are truly experienced by the population in multiple frames, viewpoints, and perspectives.

The fractured imagery reminds us of the limitations of film-based capture and the limitations of our memories. We cannot capture a complete moment of time with a photograph, just as we can never remember a complete moment of time accurately. Humans can only remember bits and pieces of a moment, and as time moves on biases and changed perspectives cloud that vision.

— Mark L. Eshbaugh, Westford, Massachusetts, USA

April 4, 2013March 20, 2013

Goseong Choi

www.GoseongChoi.com

It was in late winter when I stayed in a small village called Meji. Everything was frozen and set down so quietly. This place was surrounded by mountains, valleys and small, cultivated lands. At that time, I was overwhelmed by the cumulated pressure from a personal transition. I sort of felt released by the rural tranquility. Every day I strolled down a path though a forest and I walked over cropped and burnt fields. Sometimes I stood still on the frosted desolate land in the early morning. The silence of these moments brought me to face the inner self.

I was staring at straw laying down here and there. Pulled and snapped straw was scattered atop ashes. Their ocher bodies contrasted against the black field. Thin reeds and bare branches on the slope of cultivated field were tangled with them. The images of these agitated scenes soaked into myself and resonated. The strokes of straw slashed my mind. It hurt, so I took them.

— Goseong Choi, Brooklyn, New York, USA

April 1, 2013March 20, 2013

Beau Comeaux

www.BeauComeauxPhotography.com

My work exists at an intersection between art and science. With childlike curiosity, I examine the world with the determination of an explorer and the the eye of a scientist, studying and recording my wanderings.

I seek the strange, liminal spaces devoid of their inhabitants, but not without evidence of their presence. From remote architectural structures, to sites of construction and destruction, I investigate those areas on the periphery of our daily awareness. A solo explorer in the solitude of night, I photograph as a collector of raw materials; shadows, textures, light, and color.

— Beau Comeaux, Troy, New York, USA

March 28, 2013March 11, 2013

Allison Barnes

www.AllisonBarnes.net

Autobiogeography investigates the temporal and interconnected makeup of both geography and personal experience.

Aboriginal Australians used toas, typically made of wood and gypsum, as sign posts to mark the direction of departure from a campsite so that others could follow. My 8×10 contact prints present found marks as toas, suggesting that place is itself temporally layered, a palimpsest of the multiple traces left by individuals and groups. These impressions are sometimes literally embedded within the landscape, such as raccoon tracks in the earth and the evidence of human passage, or commemorate a natural event, including a boar’s passing and the death of an animal. Autobiography and geography converge and each image indicates a location of personal experience while offering an intertextual investigation of the landscape. The marks, whether literal or transient, reveal the land as a repository of historical memory, of traces of a past and their complex connections to other places and peoples. Autobiogeography infers from the land a sense of dynamic interaction that spans from pre-historic times into the present. Each print, a toas itself, unfolds the personal psyche and connection that we all have to the world around us.

— Allison Barnes, Savannah, Georgia, USA

March 25, 2013March 25, 2013

Anthony Hamboussi

www.AnthonyHamboussi.com

My photographs are not about making precious and unique views of particular human phenomena, but the texture of the common-scape of humanity that can be seen through the fabrics of urban spaces; attentive to the details of landscapes that extract significance from their banality, a prescription that uncovers the essence of informal spaces. My investigations are on the ‘back office’ of current social and political movements, the neglected genius of everyday life of every day’s citizens in our cities.

City is the most complete and truthful history of ourselves, and at the same time, the greatest film ever made and will be made. Within its innumerable stages, we are all directors, actors and audiences simultaneously. Within this on-going screenplay of urban spaces, I collect the traces of life that oscillates between hope and crisis.

The method and intent of my documentary practice is born from a process of self-reflection, my personal search for identity, poetry and politics.

— Anthony Hamboussi, New York City

March 21, 2013March 11, 2013

Rona Chang

www.RonaChang.com

One story at a time, This Chinese Life portrays the complex intersection of diverse peoples and cultures within varied landscapes. This project is an exploration of how the Chinese impact their environment, the varied terrain they inhabit and the way traditions are carried on simultaneously with the openings of new roads that bring about modernization and new ways of living. In my work, I observe contemporary Chinese perspectives, focusing on the surrounding landscape, immediate domestic environments, and my family ties after decades of separation. To me, the term “Chinese” does not have a fixed or a single meaning, but rather is a fluid concept that may change depending on the context. There are common denominators underlying the layers of This Chinese Life. Many people are bound by the borders that contain the landscape and/or the thousands of years of restless yet “common” history. Through the many miles, roads, villages, towns and cities I have traveled in China, what I have experienced is the multitude of stories that make up This Chinese Life. This is not a complete tale or anthology, but fragments of my Chinese life and the stories of those that I encounter.

— Rona Chang, Jackson Heights, New York & Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, USA

March 18, 2013March 11, 2013

Robert Harding Pittman

www.RHPImages.com

All across the world a uniform, homogeneous model of development, inspired by Los Angeles style urban sprawl – consisting of massive freeways, parking lots, shopping malls and large-scale master-planned communities with golf courses – is being stamped onto the earth’s topography. With this anonymous type of development not only comes the destruction of the environment, but also a loss of culture and roots, as well as alienation. This globalized model of architecture does not respect or adapt itself to the natural or cultural environment onto which it is implanted. As we have seen in recent history, fervent overdevelopment has led to crises, not only financial, but also environmental and social, and some even say psychological.

I began working on Anonymization in Los Angeles over twelve years ago. Since then I have been traveling around the world photographing the spread of “L.A. style development” in Las Vegas, Spain, France, Germany, Greece, Dubai and South Korea. The world was in the midst of a construction boom when I began the project. In the meantime most cranes have come to a screeching halt.

— Robert Harding Pittman, Madrid, Spain