Field of Depth: Landscape as Metaphor in Emerging Photography
By Carlos Motta, Exhibition Curator
Field of Depth: Landscape as Metaphor in Emerging Photography, features the work of 14 international emerging photographers who approach the "landscape" as a place for social commentary and debate. The photographs in the exhibition range from documentary to staged, from digitally constructed to microscopically recorded and from travel photography to carefully constructed scenes. All of the works rely on formal strategies, method of presentation and the use of technology to convey a common preoccupation with the role of photography as a method of representation as well as a metaphorical connection to the world of ideas.
Mariana Silva’s art projects are deeply rooted in the social and political reality of her native Chile. Silva’s videos, interactive installations and photographic documentations are just a result of her interest in the role of an artist as a mediator between people and their land. Collective Behaviors of the Inhabitants of Chile, 2003, her latest project, investigates
contemporary ritual behaviors throughout Chile, which act as foundations for a sense of social belonging. Silva has documented religious, political, sportive, and cultural events in which individuals become part of a (ideologically driven) social group. Her role as a ‘mediator’ allows the subject to speak for it self, providing a framework through which contemporary historical events might be analyzed and comprehended as part of a historical chain. The methodology of art gives Mariana Silva the possibility "to access the people of a nation and try to unmask the way in which the history of an individual and the national history are interconnected. It also gives Silva the possibility, through the use of technology, to restitute the territorial weaving, allowing human existence and experience to operate as the only way to represent history".
Gaston Zvi Ickowicz has spent the last two years documenting the rapid changes occurring in the West Bank. His series Monument was shot in the territory where Israeli and Arab homes meet. The Israeli government has built concrete walls with the intention of protecting its population from unexpected bursts of violence. As a consequence, these constructions separate the two groups. Ickowicz photographed the walls from the Israeli side; his images show sections of the concrete walls that have been decorated with depictions of landscapes. Ickowicz’s series, Settlement, looks at the construction of Israeli settlements in the same region. Virgin lands have been developed to accommodate a "handful of people". His photographs present roads and construction gear against the breathtaking landscape. Gaston Zvi Ickowicz’s still and reflective photographs exist as ‘documents’. The images are centrally composed allowing its subjects to slowly reveal the social and political weight intended by the artist. These
photographs are evocative of a long tradition of landscape photography; as images they lack any cultural specificity. But Ickowicz achieves to transcend ideas of the sublime and invites through contemplation, to the restitution of consciousness about politically induced social change.
The photographs of Lina Dorado and Luis Cantillo that form the project Second Sight present scenes and objects familiar to a world traveler. Mundane instants photographed on the road while visiting places away from home. Not unlike postcards, these photographs reveal some of the intricacies of the locations that they reference. Cultural signs such as typography, architectural details and typical natural or urban landscapes attempt to reveal their place of origin. But Dorado and Cantillo insist that these photographs, while indexical to a source, fail to represent the places that they depict. They are interested in the role of a photographer/traveler as a producer of culturally predetermined meaning. In the words of Dorado and Cantillo: "Is what he or she (the photographer) transmits only an extension of his or
her peculiar point of view? Perhaps he or she has revealed everything about his or her identity and nothing about his or her journey."
You are what you eat is the title of Roni Moc�n’s project in which he meticulously documented all the food that he ate and drank for one year. Presented in chronological order in form of a large-scale colorful grid, this work operates -according to the artist- as a self-portrait. But what do we learn about the artist through these images? Each one of the photographs that
composes the work presents a set of cultural ciphers. The kinds of plates, types of silverware and brands of foods intend to point to the artist’s location, social positioning and taste. But it is the obsessive nature of his motivation and his particular use of the photographic medium that provides a framework to unveil his intentions.
Alejandro G�mez de Tuddo’s photographs inhabit a place between the realms of the real and the symbolic. His images are evidence to a personal search for social rectification through a sort of visual mourning; a heart-felt investigation on death as an unavoidable destiny. G�mez de Tuddo’s found objects, dead animals and composed scenes are connected to anthropology and mythology. The photographer looks for the life of the remnants and assigns it through his thorough compositions, a ‘spirit’ or a ‘voice’ that leads to metaphysical questions about permanence and transcendence. G�mez de Tuddo relies on formal characteristics such as scale and color to highlight that "the figure of a thing is essential for the realization of its functions".
This phrase, borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, concerns G�mez de Tuddo as his photographs present figures that are in a final transformation yet retain their metaphorical essence.
Giada Ripa presents the audience of her photographs with intimate encounters between a
traveling woman and the ‘distant’ sites that she visits. In a photograph, the desert in its
vastness and natural harshness is the environment in which this woman stands, (always) giving
her back to the camera. Clearly out of place’ the character reenacts experiences reminiscent
of Albert Camus’ Adulterous Woman, whose protagonist experiences ‘a mystical union of the
sky and stars’ before returning home from the desert with a new awareness. Camus’
protagonist has been ‘unfaithful’ while contemplating the beauty of the landscape; she has
asserted her individuality and freedom. Ripa suggests in her photographs that her character
might be in a similar search.
In Dead in Turkestan, 2004 Ripa refers to tales of historical events such as the "theory of the
Great Game" and interweaves them with personal interpretations. Two empires, Great Britain
and the Russian Empire, were fighting for this territory of Central Asia, still unknown and
untold to many, mainly because of its terrifying surrounding and monstrous mountain and
pitiless desert. That part of the silk road, became the platform for ambitious journeys of
western archeologists and European travelers wanting to search for the lost treasures of central
Asia and bring back to the western world their fame and pride. The few that made it across the
terror lands came back known as the foreign devils on the silk road (Aurel Stein, Sven
Hedin,Paul Pelliot, Albert Von lecoqu).
Emotional Landscape
Nicolas Goldberg’s photographs of the series Unstable Geographies, present people in transit
and places of passage. An aerial view from a plane of a city insinuates a destination and
simultaneously a point of departure. In another image the silhouette of a man is fused with a
dramatic waterfall behind him, projecting a sense of vulnerability. The contemplative nature
of his photographs and the transient relationship between figures and landscape are almost
cinematic. Time for Goldberg is a crucial element, for it implies in the manner of a film-still, a
narrative. His photographs seek to present the viewer with a fictional ‘psychological’ space
through which personal emotional content is efficiently represented.
A photograph in Jenny Gaulitz’s m-series presents an apartment that seems to have been
vacated. Nobody is visible. There’s only dirt, some furniture, scattered pieces of clothing
illuminated by a lamp and some rays of sun filtering through Venetian blinds. Another image
shows a detail of a wooden floor, which mimics a seascape; the frame divided by a horizontal
line confronts the viewer with an eerie feeling of longing.
m-series is a visual essay about Gaulitz’s mother’s apartment, which "was nice, with new
wallpaper that she had chosen herself. Very few people were visiting the apartment during the
thirteen years she lived there. It was her, her brother and maybe the janitor of the building".
This contextual information is not necessarily recognized in the images. The ‘m-’ heading the
title m-series might insinuate that something remains to be discovered. The emotional weight
of these interior landscapes rests on the visual signs that are present and prompt to be
decoded.
Guido Albi Marini’s series New York Buildings reduce views of the monumental architecture of
high-rises to flat pictorial planes. Albi Marini explores light, shadow, color and form as
instruments through which he assigns his images metaphorical content. The city in Albi Marini’s
photographs is deserted and nostalgic.
Perceptual Landscape
Frank Oudeman’s beautifully imposing photographs appear at first sight to be images
exclusively concerned with light, form and color. At closer inspection though, Oudeman’s
pristine vertical surfaces reveal their photographic referent and with it the volume of his
intentions. Oudeman’s photographs are deconstructive in their attempt; the window blinds that
he uses as sets to construct the field of his photographs function as materials through which he
comments on the perceptual, physical and psychological experience of space as projected from
photographic surface. From another perspective, this type of blind is embedded with cultural
significance. Common to the US interior design of the early 90’s, the blinds are signifiers of
economic prosperity and upscale social positioning. Viewing Oudeman’s work through this prism
accentuates his interest in duality of meaning: public/private, emptiness/fullness,
abstract/real, voyeurism/participation and synthetic/physical. Perhaps the most radical of
Oudeman’s photographs is "S. 5th" in which the artist reveals the previously hidden set. This
photograph confronts the viewer with the mechanism used to hold the window blinds in place,
the photographic seamless paper conventionally used as a neutral backdrop and a mass of
synthetic green grass, which transforms the photograph into a statement about the troubled
nature of photographic representation.
Michelle Kloehn uses the Ambrotype Process to record her images. Developed in the mid 19th
Century, this wet plate collodion process achieves an image by coating a piece of glass with
various chemicals. While wet, the glass is placed in the camera and the photograph is taken
directly onto the glass. Taking advantage of the limitations of mobility, time constraint and
lack of control self-imposed by choosing this archaic technique, Kloehn produces imagery that
goes beyond the traditional expectations of this process. Though Kloehn’s plates represent
subjects not uncommon to the 19th Century tradition, her portraits and landscapes challenge
the process and the perception of her intentions. Kloehn’s landscapes are not concerned with
ideas of beauty or the bucolic. In fact these are constructed scenes that speak about the
photographic surface and its methodology of illusionism. Paper backdrops and fragments of
rocks appear skewed in the frame, revealing her hand (the photographer’s) as the ultimate
producer of meaning. Kloehn works like an alchemist "mixing up emulsions that I laboriously
coat on to each glass plate, and similar to that of an 18th century Polaroid, shoot until I am
satisfied with the image. Perched delicately on top of thin glass plates, this image can seem
fragile, perhaps fleeting. There is something intangible in these images, as if with a blink they
could disappear."
Biological Landscape
"Nature is not a photograph -life needs time- and we are running out of time to preserve the
part of ourselves which lies within our reach but beyond our skin", writes Ariel Ruiz i Altaba in
the introduction for his book Embryonic Landscapes, a collection of photographs taken by this
artist and molecular embryology researcher. Ruiz i Altaba’s handsome photographs represent
aesthetic compositions whose specific molecular referent speaks of a way of achieving
scientific knowledge. Ruiz i Altaba’s biological landscapes brings us beyond the limits of our
perceptual field; they unmask through the use of microscopic devices the complexity of human
cellular functions as well as the importance of scientific investigation and applications of
technology for the understanding of our organism’s behavior. When viewed exclusively as
abstract photographs though, these images confront the viewer with the infinite pleasure of
contemplation. Ruiz i Altaba’s use of formal strategies such as line, composition, tonal
intensity and self-conscious cropping frame his work within a tradition of formalist
photography- reminiscent of Edward Weston’s or Ernst Haas’- for which the natural landscape
was but a starting point for reflective meditation.
Lyrical Landscape
Raissa Venables’ large-scale digital collages of interior spaces face the viewer with images
more real than ordinary photographs can boast. Venables optimizes the details of many
photographs and incorporates them into one massive rendering. In the resulting images the
inside of a tent, an elevator and a stairwell evoke an almost philosophical awareness of the
impression that familiar spaces have on the psyche of their inhabitants. "Sometimes in the
presence of a familiar object we experience an extension of our intimate space", writes Gaston
Bachelard in "The Poetics of Space"; similarly, the rendered objects in Venables photographs
bear the weight of our emotional projections and attachments. Venables proposes an
experiential encounter with her photographs achieved by challenging the viewer’s traditional
expectations of the reading of an image.
