Category: Work I Like

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Jahmad Balugo

www.JahmadBalugo.com

The abundance of churches and the strong influence religion has on the community in the American South was a bit overwhelming, coming from the West.  In most neighborhoods in the Savannah area you can find a church on every other street, regardless of where you are in the city. Locals tell me “This is way it has always been and this is how it’s going to be until we perish.”

Vernacular architecture is a category of architecture based on localized needs and construction materials and reflecting local traditions. Vernacular architecture tends to evolve over time to reflect the environmental, cultural, technological and historical contexts in which it exists. It has been dismissed as crude and unrefined, but also has proponents who highlight its importance in current design.

No matter what church I go to I am always throughly interested in the structure and the location of each of these buildings, and what varies from structure to structure based on the location.

— Jahmad Balugo, Savannah, Georgia, USA

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Martina Shenal

www.MartinaShenal.com

This ongoing body of work is an exploration of the peripheral, the insignificant and sometimes monumental spaces within the Inland Seto Sea islands in southern Japan. I’m drawn to intersections of public and private, natural and the built environment, literal and metaphorical boundaries that offer protection as well as isolation. Acknowledging that place suggests an experiential encounter and space points to the unknown, these images invoke the dichotomy of an intimate encounter against the distanced backdrop of foreign observation. They are, in one sense, more about the act of looking than a narrative about place. Though they involve a detailed transcription of place, they operate within the perpetually-passing, moment–ambiguous fragments of the material world.

The title of this series, Borrowed Views, is loosely based on shakkei (borrowed scenery/views), a stylized perspective strategy used in traditional Eastern landscape painting and 17th-century Japanese garden design. In the former, vistas are overlaid to influence the way the eye perceives near, middle and far distance; in the latter, a nearby landscape monument is framed within the garden to create a meticulously-constructed focal point. Referencing a conscious manipulation of the natural world, these images evoke both real and imagined thresholds and boundaries, and refer back to the mediated construction of reality within the photograph.

— Martina Shenal, Tucson, Arizona, USA

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Michele Bressan

www.MicheleBressan.ro

The Romanian landscape is presented by archiving scenes from my immediate surroundings and typical everyday situations, from the areas I could relate to as my landscape. The images are realized avoiding the research of a typology, letting the viewer spot common patterns, in order to go beyond the topographical aspect, and imagine the whole context.

The landscape became a container of situations and relations, describing the aesthetic relationships between landmarks coming from both the Communist period and the current reality. The objective representations of how architecture intervenes in space, mixes with spontaneous and universally-valid elements, together enabling the formation of a time and site-specific imagery of the Romanian landscape.

By showing how a simple scene from the everyday life tends to appear complicated by the simple reproduction of it — because usually the sum of details can’t be spotted on the fly, I’ve chosen to fix and enlarge details and situations, offering a larger angle of view, and the possibility to choose how to approach the image.

— Michele Bressan, Bucharest, Romania

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Patricia McCormack

www.PatriciaTallulagh.wix.com

The subject I am dealing with is located in North County Dublin, and is the largest working quarry in the Republic of Ireland. Many people do not realize the quarry exists, and also do not realize the city they live in and walk through everyday is build from the material extracted from here.

A quarry stands as an enormous symbol of the consumption of raw materials by the modern world. These images show the spaces left behind when the rock has been removed, and search to find beauty in the aftermath of a destructive process for beauty can be found in the most desolate of places. The subject matter calls into question the constantly changing topography of our landscapes in order for humanity to build its desired world. As we dig down in order to build up, we destroy in order to create.

— Patricia McCormack, Dublin, Ireland

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Ruth Dudley-Carr

www.RuthDudleyCarr.com

My work is a visual diary, exploring historical events and memories, mixed with fictionalization. I use the landscape as a surrogate for self, with the images living and breathing via atmosphere and light. The images feel like an experience, either personal or interpreted. There is a cataract quality, a solemn chroma, and a patina that is evaporating, which is an attempt at forcing the viewer to consider location as emotional space rather than geographic.

— Ruth Dudley-Carr, Quincy, Massachusetts, USA

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Helena Rovira

www.MemoriesOfAnOldTree.com

This is the first series that forms a part of the project Le Bois/El Bosque, that studies the forest environment of the Pyrenees, which shelters the highlands between Spain and France.

I develop a dialog with the territory and the mass constructed by man, now left behind. That which does not appear in road guides receives attention. With it, the places without a panoramic view add interest to the story of the project, catching the common landscape as an element that covers the traveler on his way.

— Helena Rovira, Barcelona, Spain

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Christina Lange

www.ChristinaLange.com

I am drawn to working on environmental photo stories. What fascinates me the most is the interaction between humans and the wilderness, and how extreme the care for the wilderness can vary between people from the mentality of nurture and bestowing love and care to treating any open space, as long as no one can see you, as a potential for abandoning items one no longer needs. It is this contrast that informs the totality of my work.

This particular project focuses on the sad truth that for some, the wilderness is a convenient place to throw out, discard, leave behind whatever they need to get rid of. That is the story behind Basura – Southwest USA, a most breath-taking area, where unfortunately the eye gets jolted repeatedly by left-behind trash. This is a world-wide phenomena and I continue to photograph other regions I am privileged to travel to.

— Christina Lange, Salton City, California, USA

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Sarah Orr

www.SarahOrrPhotography.com

Adrift is a series of photographs representing the insecurity felt by many, due to the state of contemporary society.
 
The disparity occurring between the magnitude of the landscape and stature of the lone subject suggests feelings of precariousness and isolation, while simultaneously invoking the sublime.  Although the scenes may initially demonstrate a level of quietude, a sense of vulnerability emanates from the distinct dissimilarity. The presence of the sea and the positioning of the solitary character in relation to its enormity, references the figurative notion of being on edge. The subjects’ adoption of a stationary state, where their next move is unclear, refers to the effect that one’s circumstances can have over their demeanor. Their gazes into the distance hint toward looking elsewhere for comfort and release as well as to the desire of being removed from their current situations; sentiments increasingly prevalent for modern-day society.
 
The series references the work of the nineteenth century Romantic landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich, whose themes of isolation and solitude convey a retreat from modern life in order to pursue an alternative deepened spirituality.

— Sarah Orr, Dublin, Ireland

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Frank Abruzzese

www.FrankAbruzzese.com

“Live load” is the variable weight burdened by a structure, such as moving traffic on a bridge, furniture and people in a high-rise office building, or the weight of a person sitting on a chair.

The process used to make these images is adapted from Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), whose documentations of the Russian countryside between 1909 and 1912 are among the earliest color photographs. His work predated color film technology, therefore Gorskii used a specialized camera to take three black and white photographs in rapid succession, each frame with a red, green or blue filter placed in front of the lens. These images were then recombined, projected with their corresponding filtration to reveal full color images.

Without the same specialized camera my process is slower. The time between frames can take up to several minutes depending on the wind, a change in the lighting conditions or difficult terrain. The artifact of the resulting image appears when subjects in the frame are in motion. Both a cow grazing in a field or a tourist wandering an archeological site are frozen in a single channel of light, appearing cyan, magenta or yellow.

I’ve been told that if you’re planning to build a house on a particular site its best to observe the behavior of animals in that field. They instinctively know where the best spots are. People gather at places with expansive vistas, or find refuge from the city in a park. This process marks time, and maps our behavior and engagement with our landscape. Rather than capturing a slice of time these photographs capture a sequence, but in another way can be understood as a cycle; points where on any given day similar activities can be encountered.

— Frank Abruzzese, Wexford, Ireland

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Llorenç Ugas Dubreuil

www.LlorençUgasDubreuil.com

The need to manage, build and occupy space takes us from ancient times to the present, as we modify our environment to suit our needs. The overbuilt city engulfs us, drags us and pushes us. While building this landscape, we have accumulated many places that observed from a distance, and when not in use, are shown to us as strange, even absurd. These spaces, converted into places with no name, and no apparent function, lose the power of what they have been designed for, and build up in every city.


I wonder what these places look like illuminated at night. All are places built for the development of society, for their alleged welfare. Spaces used to move, to direct, to entertain; places all having functions and often necessary for our development as a society. But then what good are they at night? Why are they still working? Why are there so many and why are they there, as if someone had turned on the power to use?

— Llorenç Ugas Dubreuil, Barcelona, Spain