New Landscape Photography

www.Loretta-Ayeroff.Photoshelter.com
Loretta has this to say about her project called Los Angeles, Dedicated to Raymond Chandler:

This current work is “noirish,” a darker view of my hometown than my previous images presented. I have always been interested in photographing the mundane, the obvious and proletariat vistas of the middle-class.

Upon research, and a Raymond Chandler reading spree, I discovered that I had been living the past three years only blocks away from two Chandler residences.

“Towards Drexel Ave.,” shot from my current studio window, is homage to Mr. and Mrs. Chandler, who lived around the corner during the years 1943-1946.

www.JasonReblando.net

Jason has this to say about his project called New Deal Utopias:

During the Great Depression, the U.S. government built three planned communities of Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin.

In photographing these “Greenbelt Towns,” I explore the New Deal vision to resettle displaced farmers and poor urban dwellers in model cities which unified the best elements of “town” and “country.”

I create an evocation of utopia as a place and idea in the American mind, while examining how this vision plays out in the contemporary moment.

I draw inspiration for my work from my curiosity in power structures and urban planning, in order to explore the complex relationship between humans, nature, and the built environment.

www.FeritKuyas.com

Ferit has this to say about his project called City of Ambition: Fast Forward in China:

City of Ambition is a series of citycapes from Chongqing, one of the largest cities in the world. My images reflect the sheer dimensions of the place. Like most of my work this project has autobiographic roots: I got to know the city through my in-laws, who live there. The people of Chongqing are very eager to show the world and their sister cities in China who they are. Together with the booming economy, this leads to an explosion in city development.

I am mostly interested in the outskirts, where the city can’t really be seen, but rather sensed. Also construction sites and places of change are of interest to me. They show us metaphorical facets of the huge changes taking place in contemporary China.

Astonishingly, Chongqing is an unknown place for most people in the western world. The city is located in Southwest China’s region of Sichuan and was the capital of China during World War II. The municipality is populated by approximately 32 million people.

www.ShanahanPhotos.com

Patrick has this to say about his work:

Patrick Shanahan’s photographs of Britain and Europe investigate the contemporary cultural landscape, offering a seductive and unsettling re-imaging of modern urban environments.

Making full use of the scenographic, artificial aspects of large-scale photography, Patrick produces topographic images that are close to the kinds of minimalism found in painting and sculpture.

His largely unpopulated compositions are subjected to a pristine finish and treatment of light, colour and space that help to establish a tension between a real and constructed landscape – a landscape in which the distinction between reality and imagination seems to blur and we are left with a peculiar sense of spatial estrangement.

www.MelanieBahuon.com

French journalist Arnaud de La Bouillerie has this to say about Melanie’s work:

From Odessa to Kertch, on the shore sides of the Baltic Sea, from sea to earth, in Jurmala or the Tallinn suburbs, Melanie Bahuon carries a unique eye which questions the wonders and the finiteness of the world.

Her eye, looking “a little beyond the horizon”, at the tips of unnamed territories or in the depths of hostile seas, travels across the universe and its elements, scattered by discrete human traces.

Naming neither the lands nor the shores, Melanie’s eye wanders in the vastness, reuniting the antipodes and takes us on a mind journey tinted with melancholy.

What is it to guess beyond the perspective and the textures?

In a colourful and poetic mastering of the medium format Melanie Bahuon is humbly questioning planet earth, and beyond, mankind.

www.JoniSternbach.com

Joni has this to say about her project called The Salt Effect:

The Salt Effect is a phrase that I first heard while photographing during an artist-in-residency in northwestern Utah, a region of great beauty and harsh conditions.

It was meant as a play off the term “The Lake Effect,” which describes the odor of Great Salt Lake: The wind blows southward with a sulfur-like smell that ironically transforms a breathtaking place into one where it can be unpleasant to take a simple breath.

The Salt Effect aptly describes my immersion and experience in the weather of the high desert surrounding Great Salt Lake. This series of photographs is my initial investigation into understanding the western landscape.

www.GianpaoloArena.com

Gianpaolo has this to say about his project called The Pleasure of the Outdated:

The area situated in the Treviso and Venezia districts is a workshop of languages, historical stratifications and quick occupation processes of agricultural lands.

On the remains of changes of the territory, some marks and fragments of rural archeology emerge: farmhouses and agricultural ruins where the vegetation, like a virus, has damaged the architectural structure itself, changing its morphology.

Immediate in the observer is reference to the past, the experience of time, memory, the charm of the ruins, the idea of sublime suggested by Piranesi and Goethe, the promised revelation by this invasion of disorder and devastation.

It almost looks like nature can take care of the secrets of the past better than man: decadent but animated by its own inner life made of plants and animals, extraordinary evidence of memory, history and culture.

www.DouglasLjunkvist.com

Douglas has this to say about his work:

I am a Brooklyn-based photographer originally from Sweden. My personal work is intuitive, self expressive, and about feeling and mood.  Attributes to describe my personal work include urban, graphic, vernacular, and quiet.  I am drawn to color, space, lines, and form.

www.DaveHebb.com

Dave has this to say about his work:

The natural environment, our industrial and technological infrastructure, and my place within them, are the focus of my work as a visual artist.

Timescapes, my most recent body of work, uses photography and video to document the transformation of various landscapes over long spans of time.

Questions about the long-term global impact that industrialized civilization has on the environment are framed within the context of my own rural surroundings in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

This relationship with nature is investigated by examining long term natural effects on industrial artifacts within the landscape, such as a discarded computer monitor or sewer drainage pipe.

I invite the viewer to contemplate their own relationship with nature as a formal meditation while also implying complicity in its destruction and ultimate responsibility for conserving natural resources and preserving what’s left of our natural environment.

www.SusanMayTell.com

Susan has this to say about her project called A Requiem: Tribute to the Spiritual Space at Auschwitz:

In Auschwitz, I felt the presence of its ghosts guiding me, guiding my camera, and was then, and continue to be now, moved to share this place’s tale of tragedy through the images I saw through my lens.

I arrived there almost by happenstance. While planning a trip to Prague and Budapest, I learned that an overnight train goes from Prague to Krakow – and from there it was a short local train ride to Auschwitz.

I walked the grounds in silence, in meditation, photographing the aesthetics, the mood, the sense of foreboding – and tried to capture the energy that lives in that space.

Equally important to my artistic vision is my commitment to Auschwitz as a meditation on decay and memory. Like others’ sacred grounds that are decaying, Auschwitz today is disappearing and raises questions about whether places of this kind should be restored and the importance of memory and commemoration.

www.LaurenHenkin.com

Lauren has this to say about her project called Still Standing, Standing Still:

One of the issues I struggle with in my life is being open. I think it stems from a fear of being judged, that in knowing the real me, I will be found lacking in some capacity and abandoned. It’s something I’ve tried to work through, a lack of faith in anything that would endure.

It is one of the reasons I wanted to become an architect. I thought that in imagining these built forms, I was creating something that would remain, something I could construct that would stand long after I was gone. It is also the reason why I’m so drawn to photographing the natural world, especially near urban areas.

Repeatedly, the subjects that I find engaging are the ones that survive in an environment meant to exterminate as a way to answer the questions I continually grapple with: What is permanent? Will anything last?

I became obsessed with this lone tree’s form and photographed it more intensely than any subject I have ever focused on. It was alone, with its scars unclothed, threatened by vines, but still standing. I was moved by its quiet beauty and strength, within it a humble model of perseverance and survival.

www.LisaMRobinson.com

Lisa has this to say about her work:

For the past five years, I have been making photographs in the snow and ice. I am interested in metaphor, and have sought to comprehend our human place in this world.

On the surface, these images are quite beautiful. They appear elegantly simple and accessible, evoking, perhaps, the silent tranquility that one might feel after a fresh snowfall.

Beneath the surface, however, there is a subtle tension. Like fine haiku, each image quietly references another season, a time of life or activity that has already passed, and may come again.

Throughout the series run the leitmotifs of poles and ropes and a palette of man-made color. The relationship between the human and the natural world becomes more tightly intertwined as the series progresses, and the cycles of life and death and transformation fold inward.

This interest in time passage and life cycles becomes distilled in explorations of water itself. Ice, snow, fog and water embody the liminal states of a primary element. At times, the multiple forms exist simultaneously.

It is as though the thing itself possesses its own counterpoint and transformation is a constant condition, despite seeming moments of stillness.

www.FrankGohlke.com

www.AaronSiskind.org

This is from the Aaron Siskind Foundation website:

Photographer and educator Aaron Siskind (1903-1991) holds a preeminent place in the history of American photography.

Beginning his photographic career in the 1930’s as a social documentarian with the New York Photo League, he ultimately radicalized the medium by emphasizing the photograph as an abstract form of expression and an aesthetic end in itself.

Siskind taught in New York City’s public schools for 25 years before becoming recognized as a photographer and then a gifted pioneer of photographic education.

His vision and methods have and will continue to inspire and instruct future generations of artists and teachers.

www.LauraMcPhee.com

www.KarenApolloniaMueller.com

Karen has this to say about her work:

In “Angels in Fall” I am interested in documenting the disconnection

and forlorness of man to his environment.

www.KarenHalverson.com

Karen has this to say about her project called Downstream: Exploring The Colorado River:

The Colorado is no longer a wild thing. It’s a human construct, a pipeline. Except near the sources, neither the Green nor the Colorado flows free. Colorado River water is entirely used up before reaching the delta of its own making.

The West depends for its life on Colorado River water and reclamation is a remarkable feat. But there has been a heavy price.  Hundreds of square miles of desert and canyon country now lie buried beneath giant reservoirs.

Downsteam chronicles my exploration of the mainstem Colorado — the mountainous reaches, the rushing canyon waters, the stilled reservoirs, and the diminished waters of the lower river.

Sometimes I find beauty, sometimes desecration, often a perplexing and absurd combination.

www.ScottConarroe.com

Scott has this to say about his project called By Rail:

I like to think of By Rail as more “sweeping epic” than polemic.  The conversation I find most interesting has the railway as the skeleton of our northern New World civilization. In the myth of America immigrants and civil war veterans constructed The First Transcontinental Railroad in eastern states, and from the Pacific prodigious Chinese labour forced tracks through mountains; rail populated frontiers and diminished native-controlled territories.  Here, coast-to-coast confederation was contingent upon a rail link, and telegraph lines (remote communication!) were erected in rail sidings.  We’ve matured in tandem with mechanized travel; the design of our communities, our conception of how to utilize space reflects that.  I think it’s useful to extrapolate further and recognize more ephemeral conventions like time zones are also products of railway companies.

www.JBennettFitts.com

www.AlejandroCartagena.com

Journalist Peggy Roalf had this to say about Alejandro’s project called Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect:

Photographer Alejandro Cartagena has taken the theme of suburban sprawl to a new level of visualization and power in a body of work entitled Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect.  Shot over a period of three years in his hometown of Monterrey, Mexico, the series focuses on disruption to the landscape, both physical and social, that has occurred as a result of overbuilding.

Since 2001, the city has been transformed due to contradicting policies that have allowed developers to build more than 300,000 new houses in the metropolitan region.  Cartagena has recorded these monumental changes, with a vision that both heroic and poignant.

In a race to put up cheap housing fast, the landscape has been urbanized before plans for efficient roadways, recreational parks and public transportation can be realized.  As well as capturing the relentless march of uniform structures across an arid landscape, Cartagena has also explored the hardships faced by the new inhabitants of what can truly be described as the new dystopia.

www.NoahBeil.com

www.BrunoChalifour.com

Bruno has this to say about his project called Les Fougeres:

This body of work is the result of the eery meeting of two like-minded individuals. Gérard Desplanques and I are twins in vision and sensitivity. He paints, I photograph. We met in 1991 at a common exhibition and we jumped at seeing each other’s works. We accused each other of working from the other one’s work without having the courtesy to mention it to him. We were both wrong.

We decided to challenge the meeting and extend the work. The production remained strictly parallel in their resemblance, even after I had spent a whole year in the United States, without contact, even when both our styles had evolved.

In 1997 when Gérard decided to move from town (Guéret) to country, and restore an old barn made of grey granite stones–the way farms and barns are traditionally built in the Limousin region in the center of France–we decided to work in a circle of about 500 m in radius around his new house, at the end of a small country road, at the very end of a 12-house hamlet “Les Fougères.” Ten years later, we are still working within this area.

Les Fougères strictly means ‘The Ferns” in French. They grow everywhere along the paths, the clear streams, under the chestnut trees and oaks for which the Limousin region is famous [that’s where the oaks for the casks of Bordeaux wines and Cognac have grown for centuries]. The work is trictly about, as mentioned in the quote by Robert Adams in the introduction to this website, geography, biography, and metaphor. I was born among these ferns, under the shade of these trees, eating roasted chestnuts and drinking fresh cider.

www.JeffreyRich.com

Jeff has this to say about his project called Watershed: A Survey of the French Broad River Basin:

A common misconception of a watershed is that it’s all about the water. While water does play a large part, the land plays an even larger role by directing the water to a common point, such as a river or ocean. Thus human impact on the land directly affects the water that runs over it.

With this project I highlight the relationship between the land, water and man, within the microcosm of the southeastern watersheds. The French Broad and the Tennessee watersheds make up the southeastern quarter of the Mississippi watershed, the largest river basin in North America.

New Landscape Photography showcases contemporary work from around the world, as well as masters of the genre. The emphasis is on projects, not single images.
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