Tag: paul

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David Paul Bayles

DavidPaulBayles.com

Two years after a neighbor clearcut a portion of the forest my wife and I live in, a fierce windstorm roared across the open clearcut and ripped apart, uprooted and toppled 120 of our trees. A few of them hit our house.

Foresters call it a catastrophic windthrow.

After repairing our home and re-planting our land, I began to photograph the tree farms that surround us. There are three distinct phases, beginning with the clearcut. Next is the burn phase where limbs are piled high and burned in the fall. In late winter and early spring new seedlings are planted.

In forty years, when the Douglas firs just begin to feel like a forest, they are felled and the cycle begins again.

From certain vistas all three phases can be viewed in a rolling mosaic of industrial efficiency and productivity.

— David Paul Bayles, Corvallis, Oregon, USA

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Paul Harrison & Jim Denham

PaulHarrisonOnline.co.uk

A Changed Land

When the Nottinghamshire Coalfield in central England reached highest production output there were 30 collieries in operation. Coal production at Gedling Colliery began in 1902 and continued until 1991. Over 70 million tons of coal was mined and at its most productive in 1924 there were more than 3884 men working there. 130 miners died on site.

Photographing over a five year period Jim Denham and I walked the whole site and in all weather: from bleached-blinding hot summer days to painful-cold blue winter. We continually photographed using both digital and analogue.

Our images are a reaction to and a record of the joining point between the death of industrial coal extraction and the conversion of the landscape to controlled recreation and leisure. We feel lucky to have been in the right place at the right time and to have witnessed a short pause in a changing land.

— Paul Harrison & Jim Denham, Nottingham, England

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Paul Yurkovich

PaulYurkovich.com

In this series titled Driftless in Wisconsin, my intentions are both to document land and space in my home state and to attempt to define the word “driftless,” taking it in its literal sense: to be unmoving and unchanging. 

With the geology of The Driftless Area as a backdrop, these images display a sense of permanence of the commonplace. Images include scenes of abandoned artifacts and structures, of people in recreation, and scenes that appear to be fixtures.

This series began with a westward weekend drive soon after moving to Madison, Wisconsin. I became immediately caught up and amazed by the landscape. After learning that this landscape held the poetic name of The Driftless Area (an area of land that escaped glaciation in the last glacial period), I became engrossed. This discovery coincided with myself, after much time spent moving around, finally becoming content with where I lived — in a sense, becoming driftless.

— Paul Yurkovich, Madison, Wisconsin, USA

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Paul Walsh

© Paul Walsh

www.PaulWalshPhotography.uk

I am interested in exploring the relationship between walking and photography. All Things Pass traces my walk along the hundreds of miles of canal towpath that connects the river Thames in London with my parent’s home in Birmingham.

When I got the news of my mother’s illness, a condition that left her unable to walk, I travelled back and forth on the train between London and Birmingham to visit her. I remember gazing out of the train window wondering what it would be like to make the journey on foot, along the canal I could see running alongside the train line. I decided that for once I would make the walk back home, into the house where I was born.

In the current light of my mother’s illness, I became caught up in thoughts about the ephemeral nature of places as I walked. The deteriorating factories of the city soon gave way to pastoral landscapes and I became aware of the fleeting nature of the world around me, as everything I happened upon came into view before disappearing behind me. I set out to make photographs of the places that lie beyond the view of the canal from my mother’s bedroom window. I also wanted to show how places deteriorate and succumb to decay, yet many recover, transform and eventually find a way to thrive again.

— Paul Walsh, Brighton, United Kingdom

© Paul Walsh

© Paul Walsh3

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Paul Raphaelson

© Paul Raphaelson

www.PaulRaphaelson.com

Once the biggest sugar refinery in the world, Domino shut down in 2004, after a long struggle. Most Brooklynites of my generation know it as an icon on the landscape, multiplied on t-shirts and skateboard graphics. Urban explorers sly enough to breach the gates have found a playground of sublime, post-industrial texture and nostalgia.

I’ve been attracted for a long time to the iconic and esthetic features of the place. I also realized that if I had the chance to photograph it, I’d want the work to explore something more.

In 2013, the owner of the site, Two Trees, generously agreed to let me in. I had proposed a project that would attempt to look beyond the popular surface of Detroit-style decay photography. My goal was an expansive, even messy, fusion of art, icon, and industrial history. I wanted to show the ruin as its majestic self, and also as a lens through which to explore the history of the place and its people.

In a sense, I found myself looking at a long-gone version of the country, through a recently-gone industry and community, through a soon-to-be gone abandoned factory.

I also found myself working in the abstract, seeing how much chaos could be allowed into the frame, while still making a coherent picture. The visual density and confusion of the place invited this kind formal experiment.

The project will ultimately be a book — I hope a big and beautiful one. I’ll be working with Matthew Postal, an architectural historian who can show the deep connections between Domino, the global sugar trade, and the history of Brooklyn. I’ll also be working with Stella Kramer, a world-class photo editor, and with a group of former refinery employees, who can tell Domino’s real stories.

— Paul Raphaelson, Brooklyn, New York, USA

From the top of the bin structure.

Conveyor and foot bridge, from filter house.

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Paul Alexander Knox

SEPT 30 Paul Alexander Knox

www.PaulAlexanderKnox.com

The Space Between explores the different phases of social housing and regeneration via compulsory purchase order sites. Homes were demolished to make way for a new wave of regeneration to come. The collapse of the market has left these areas as liminal spaces, spaces between. I have photographed the remnants and marks left on the land where homes previously stood highlighting the once vital infrastructure that now stand as odd objects separated from function.

Social housing was built to house the working class, creating thriving communities constructed around an industrial heart. During the early Thatcher years those community members were given an opportunity to own their homes through a statutory right to buy, with discounts beyond their wildest dreams. 1.6 million council properties became private homes. Simultaneously the industries began to close down, splintering the communities, turning neighbourhoods into “council estates” dotted with privately owned homes. The estates became rife with unemployment and “antisocial behaviour,” leaving the homeowners to watch the slow decline of the community. The economic prosperity of the new millennium found these estates out-dated and over-run with social ills yet positioned on prime real estate. They were eyed for higher value regeneration, the council tenants were rehoused and the homeowners given CPOs. Not all home owners, many now retired, were willing to sell their homes for the dramatically reduced rates offered. The demolition of the vacated council homes began around them. The collapse of the market stalled this process leaving many proud homeowners with their spruced-up houses isolated and often attached to derelict and dilapidated shells.

The issues that led to the breakdown of communities have not been addressed: unemployment continues to rise and the “antisocial” have been moved on to other estates. The future of social housing is uncertain, as is the future of these spaces; the spaces between.

— Paul Alexander Knox, Gateshead, United Kingdom

© Paul Alexander Knox

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Gian Paul Lozza

© Gian Paul Lozza

www.LozzaPhoto.com

The journey leads into the depth of the human psyche. A place of darkness and melancholy. A place where the observer is at the mercy of himself. He wanders alone through the alleys of his imagination; traverses unreal places and encounters strange thoughts and dreams. The film of inner images captivates the observer and leads him into unknown corners of his consciousness.

My photography is meant to be mysterious and secluded. Soft and pale, like an air draught, the light sweeps throughout the pictures and bestows the scenes with vague apprehensions. All the senses are alert. They capture sharpened contours; feel the weight of the objects. Light sources captivate the eye and drag it to the picture. Objects approach and poise. The curtain is drawn, the objects are mantled, apertures closed. As if just fallen from the sky, a box and a capsule are standing in a landscape. Questions shall arise from the strangeness of these scenes and draw the observer down into unknown places.

The locations of my photography are not staged, but searched for intuitively. Every day and everywhere they are waiting for our eyes to be seen. I deliberately fade out shapes, remove impedimenta and adjust superimpositions. The pictures remain deliberately empty and melancholic, working like film stills, by suggesting stories, which are searching their way through the observer’s associative array of images and thoughts.

— Gian Paul Lozza, London, United Kingdom

© Gian Paul Lozza

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Nick Dunmur & Paul Harrison

www.Limn.mn

Working over a twelve-month period in Nottinghamshire, England, we have used high-resolution digital and traditional pinhole photography to explore areas at the interface between natural and synthetic landscape.

The edgelands are a kind of wasteland considered unusable, overlooked, undefined and unattractive. These are neglected, often forgotten areas.

Edgelands, the project, starts to explore what landscape means to us. Land is more than physical landscape and environment. It is unique and has symbolic importance. It has value — perhaps a meaning as significant as its physical embodiment. British landscape and its predominantly manufactured presence affects us physically and emotionally and stimulates us intellectually, even spiritually. Edgelands are landscapes that are connected to human activity both historical and contemporary; tracts of land at the crossing point of the rural and urban.

The underlying theme of the work comes from its engagement with basic human issues of our place in the landscape — how and where we belong.

— Nick Dunmur & Paul Harrison, Nottingham, United Kingdom

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Paul Kuimet

www.PaulKuimet.com

The photographic series In Vicinity depicts new suburban development areas near Tallinn, Estonia. Shot entirely within a five-kilometer radius of where I grew up, I have tried to document the results of the vast change from former agricultural farming lands to new housing developments in the 2000’s. I believe that upon close inspection this deformed landscape can reveal something essential about the culture that produces the desire to live this way. The recent economic downfall has, of course, left some people’s desires unfulfilled.

— Paul Kuimet, Tallinn, Estonia

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Paul Seawright

www.PaulSeawright.info

These new photographs bring together the two major themes of my practice: contemporary cities and the representation of conflict. Volunteer extends previous work, interrogating how contemporary conflict might be represented beyond the battlefield, without recourse to drama-centric imagery. Volunteer is a survey of sorts: landscapes from today’s fraying, centreless post 9-11 North American cities.

Each photograph was made at the location of a military recruiting station. Starting in Texas, the highest recruiting state in the US, I visited over 500 military-recruitment offices in 15 states.

The images comment not just on the ongoing war and the battle to recruit new soldiers, but the contemporary North American city: a landscape littered with thrift stores, gun dealerships, fast food outlets, nightclubs, car dealerships, strip malls and pawn shops.  It is in these spaces on the margins of small towns and cities that the recruiters move amongst the unemployed, immigrants, ethnic minorities and students to find the volunteers of tomorrow.

— Paul Seawright