Work I Like – Page 46 – New Landscape Photography

Twice a day for ten years, formerly with my companion Barney the dog, I walked a circular route along this small stretch of river close to my home in northern England, often in the pouring rain, frequently in the freezing pitch dark.

I calculate that, taking occasional absences into account, we walked this route approximately nine thousand times.

The river marks a boundary between the city and the arable (farm) lands and is not only a favourite spot for the dumping and burning of stolen cars or for junkies to hang out; but is also used by dog walkers (myself included) and as an adventure playground for the local kids. For many it is invisible, a non-place passed by on the way to greater treasures in the city or the countryside real and as such becomes its own place free of any expectations of ever being more than it is.

— John Darwell, Carlisle, United Kingdom

March 11, 2013March 1, 2013

Andrew G. Fisher

www.AndrewGFisher.com

Beside the Seaside explores the complex relationship between time and place. In winter, seaside resorts lie dormant and quiet: ghost towns haunted by nature. Only echoes of the vibrant summer past remain, bringing promise and hope for summers to come. My photographs try to capture this feeling and convey the quiet and lonely beauty of the places I visit. I use film and hand print my own photographs. This allows me to stay connected to the whole photographic process.

— Andrew G. Fisher, Liverpool, United Kingdom

March 7, 2013February 23, 2013

Stanley Bloom

www.StanleyBloom.com

Techniques can change over time, but there is a thing which varies hardly with years: it is the topic of an artist, who finally reflects our personality, what is really in us.

To me, photography is a solitary act: it is necessary to be involved in the place, to be forgotten, and to become soaked with it perfectly. My images are generally melancholic, and oneiric, but without artifice. There is in my subjects a share of mystery which I can’t even reveal to myself. I try to provoke a feeling, a mood.

My calm temperament is translated in my rather harmonious, more uncluttered compositions, and quietness. Silence reigns on these places, as if they had been deserted, but human is never far away and some proofs come to testify of his activity. I like this contrast, questioning me on the humankind’s place in a pre-established nature.

— Stanley Bloom, Paris, France

March 4, 2013February 23, 2013

Ben Kelly

www.Ben-Kelly.com

We see the suburbs as ugly; we lament the loss of natural beauty.  We rush around by day filling every second, yet feeling completely unfulfilled.  And while we sleep wondering what it’s all about and perhaps dreaming of what once was,  the silent beauty of the landscape returns; altered, yet still there.

People have described my work as dark and menacing, with a foreboding quality, but I think this is more to do with the viewer’s own perceptions, formed by influences like human nature, upbringing and a paranoid media; which push the idea that bad things happen at night. For me, these are places that have a certain magic to them, rather than menace.

While the urban landscape is full of activity by day with people and cars, my photos are absent of these so as not to distract the viewer. There is a distinct absence of people because human nature first draws our attention to figures, and away from the landscape. The focus of my photography isn’t on people but on place, on the landscape itself.

 My series, Suburbs at Night, is an ongoing exploration started in 2009 that attempts  to seek out these spaces and the landscape that remains, although forever changed, still timeless.

— Ben Kelly, Melbourne, Australia

February 28, 2013February 22, 2013

Christine Rogers

www.CERogers.net

For my Fulbright project, Photographing Imagined Landscapes: The Switzerland of India, I am visiting the northern hill stations of India from Darjeeling to Dalhousie and others in between, all of which lay claim to the landscape of “the Switzerland of India.” I am fascinated by what has happened in this particular region; through tourism, marketing and, in particular, Bollywood filmmaking, another landscape (the Swiss Alps) has been imagined throughout the northern Indian landscape, and in its place an imitation of an imitation has been constructed. I am photographing the cultural confluence of this region at the daybreak of the Indian middle class tourist industry.

— Christine Rogers, Northern India

February 25, 2013February 22, 2013

Al Palmer

www.AlPalmer.co.uk

The Edge of Industry is a cycle of photographs taken at the site of a derelict magnesium works near Hartlepool in the North of England where heavy industry has died off over the past thirty years. These images indirectly reference the death of shipbuilding and metal works, the lack of government action to prevent the North and South of England dividing both economically and socially, creating a generation of workers with no future; directly they show the land has yet to be redeveloped; it remains in a perpetual state of ruin.

With an increasing amount of closures among factories in England these photographs are both a record of the end of a specific industrial area and also a quiet farewell to the past of the North of England.

— Al Palmer, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, United Kingdom

February 21, 2013February 21, 2013

Lauren Grabelle

www.LaurenGrabelle.com

Originally from New Jersey, I moved to Montana in 2010 to heal the wounds that are created by living in the most densely populated state and being so isolated from nature. In Montana I feel the land differently each day and record it as I feel it.

— Lauren Grabelle, Bigfork, Montana, USA

February 18, 2013January 29, 2013

Robert Chilton

www.RobertChilton.co.uk

I’m looking for the facts of estrangement and impulse.

Trying to photograph the abrasions and remnants that squirm out when circumstance takes a small hold of place. Abrasions that in chorus can be elegant with tenderness and violence, and while disparate, when re-articulated in the new structure a photographic sequence can echo-out or be amplified.

— Robert Chilton, London, United Kingdom

February 14, 2013January 29, 2013

Maureen Drennan

www.MaureenDrennan.net

In trying to comprehend my husband’s vulnerability due to a severe depression, I made images of him and a landscape familiar to me. Many of these photographs were made on Block Island, R.I., a place I lived as a child for one year with my father when my parents were divorcing. Block Island is a lively community during the summer but the off season is particularly desolate and windswept. The title of this series, the sea that surrounds us, comes from a love poem by Pablo Neruda and suggests the isolation and protection one can simultaneously experience within a relationship.

— Maureen Drennan, Brooklyn, New York, USA

February 11, 2013February 11, 2013

Colin C. Stearns

www.ColinCStearns.org

Beginning in 1763, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed 300 miles of wilderness over the span of four years and ten months, all the while foreshadowing a cultural barrier that will stand the test of time.

I walk the path made by Mason and Dixon looking for the beginning of this country’s compass, in the process, imagining the vision they saw. I photograph this border of cultural distinction at the places of its occurrence, which often appear open-ended and without detail.

Visual indicators of the border reveal themselves to me. Physical deviations within the land, such as a change in the asphalt’s tone, signal where one state ends and the next begins. I always depict more than one state in the photograph, typically with the border directly in the middle and my tripod straddling the division.

I do not photograph road signs. I leave the viewer to identify what is seen. Perhaps there is nothing, just wilderness as Mason and Dixon saw it, before any of it mattered. This border was created before states were states, before the Union was chartered and before the Civil War. What comes of it when a culture self divides its common geographic space? What happens when a culture is delineated and then has to identify as being a part of a new and separate whole?

Boundary lines shape and contain cultural identity by preventing one culture from ingesting the other. This body of work examines the original motive for the Mason and Dixon survey and how the result came to inadvertently shape the regional culture.

— Colin C. Stearns, Brooklyn, New York, USA