lane – New Landscape Photography

The Older Industrial Parks Near Newport, Victoria

This is an extended dialogue with the late Lewis Baltz’s seminal 1974 work The New Industrial Parks Near Irvine, California. The result offers images that transform Baltz’s stark Californian minimalism into an ethereal antipodean nocturne.

Baltz’s spartan boxes manifest a common American theme: the promised land defiled. He was interested in “the phenomena of the place. The effect of this kind of urbanism… What kind of new world was being built here?”

Australian landscape rarely elicits such blatant anger. Our notion of landscape seems very different. Baltz documents the short-term impact of money while my project explores the mildly subversive impact of people after the event (more erosion than explosion).

My aims and Baltz’s may seem different and yet they are very much connected. Both projects are deeply rooted in an exploration of place and time, there and here, then and now, Baltz and Lane.

— Bill Lane, Melbourne, Australia

TerenceLane.com

I am interested in transition. I see and try to absorb the landscape, rural and urban, my garden, the forest, the wide open, the horizon. Sometimes I respond to the formal aspects of design placed within or possibly growing out of a landscape, at other times I try to make some sense of the apparent chaos in nature and respond to that challenge. In observing these transitions, I seek out the history, the future and the things that seem to be hanging in between or simply the here and now – the present but changing state.

These images show a coal mine which closed over thirty years ago. The mine is a museum, the community has just about gone and slowly the houses are being boarded up to prior to their destruction, finally being crushed to become hardcore, forming a new seam of solid foundation to support a luxury housing landscape.

— Terence Lane, Nottingham, England