Giants on the horizon


Through this survey Mark Bentley assures us that photography maintains its potential as an effective means to explore contemporary urban issues. However, the statements of photography, now commonly understood as an expressive language, are also evidence for sociological and anthropological research on the human landscape and require great discrimination in what is produced by the mind before approaching the technical. That will demand, especially for those involved in spatial planning, the possession of reading skills applied to images. This ability, today mistakenly taken for granted, results in a prolific, redundant, often cloying and insipid, iconographic production (at times in overdose) of images concerning the landscape. A reading that is not only grammatically correct but also conceptually considered regarding what is published will become crucial as we see in the words of Mark Bentley, a Scottish photographer based in Madrid with a passion for architecture.


«The aim of this (unfinished) project is to photograph and document tower blocks located in different European cities. Conceived primarily as a utopian solution to the shortage of Post-war housing, this building type was adopted almost universally on both sides of the Iron Curtain. More than half a century later, these high-rise residential buildings continue to characterize and define the urban morphology of most European cities. Despite the documentary nature of the project, my intention however, is to avoid the socio-political context of each place and focus instead on the idea of the architectural portrait and the ideals of portrayal. In architectural photography it’s common practice to portray buildings under idealised lighting conditions and to strive for ‘uninterrupted’ final images. This practice can also be observed in the typically polished world of advertising: tourism marketing campaigns being of particular relevance. Taken as a controversial part of the urban fabric - both aesthetically and socio-politically - my aim is to achieve portraits of these tower blocks without resorting to the mediatised image of urban decay (stereotype) commonly associated with them. I also strive to avoid momentous examples (protagonism), as well as extremes in scale (overemphasis).»

Sand in the smoke

Carlos Jiménez Cahua stands distantly to observe, study and almost embrace the essential character of the relationship that insists between man and his nature. He does this by choosing a land dry and dusty, a desert almost as flat as the grey sky that casts weak shadows upon it. A landscape suspended in a mist that takes the breath away as an inevitable fate. In this alien landscape, dry, inhospitable to most, the Peruvian photographer portrays life or rather a desire to live within diffuse boundries and melancholy tones. Yet life goes on as the constant struggle to impose one’s existential condition over the unknown. A wall, a roof, a stone, a cross and several other attempts to break time and thus nature that itself is in constant evolution, to bend space to one’s advantage and to be more than aware passengers. Moreover this works takes us to a place where we recognize that survival within a harsh environment challenges our expectations of culture.The impositions of cultural constructions within this landscape seem almost absurd like the stage set of a Beckett play.

«What´s primarily driven my interest in landscape photography is not the landscape itself but it´s relationship to man. I´m particularly interested in the earth where it´s at the nascent or continuous stages of development by people, between the virgin earth and concrete cities. This apart from a deep aesthetic attraction to Lima is what motivates my choice of the city as a subject, where development is so rampant (and haphazard), that these new areas are called pueblos jóvenes, or young towns. Ultimately, despite my focus on pieces of earth, I think my photographs speak more of the people thereon.»

Temporary contemporary

The long-term project called “Copia” sees Brian Ulrich engaged for seven years in a kind of visual anthropological exploration of the so-called culture of consumerism. He travels through the United States tracing what we might venture to define as a new geography of homogenization. Representing a wide and transversal world of malls and department stores, strongly characterized as confusing, through portraits so merciless as to appear delicate, imbued with an almost existentialist poetic, leaves no way out and forces the viewer to question the ironclad logic that underlies this model of economic development even before the social and political, which has long shown its limits. The huge fluorescent lit big box stores that everyday dispense multicolored objects and conscript willing supporters of the common cause, that of the economic recovery of a country that for its survival is constrained to equate consumerism and patriotism, appear as magnificent creaking temples, winking portals wide open to a inevitable vacuum, which sometimes is reflected in the faces, more frightened than unaware, of those who pass through these places every day.

Hooded opulence

Dealing with the social transformations of the land is also a way to understand our inner geography. This unpronounceable series of Dutch photographer Kraaijeveld seems to start from a spontaneous curiosity about the more unusual aspects of life that coincides with China’s tumultuous productive strength. A sort of fatal attraction that leads him to place himself behind the scenes to observe and portray people within a carefree atmosphere. This is one way to extract meaning that is not obvious or trivial. A misleading reading because at first we see the ironies which become subtly ambiguous due to the constant presence of compassion. This,however,is likely the artist’s real signature.

«Zelfontspanchinezen, how to translate that? Literally it would be something like self relaxing Chinese, but that’s not exactly it. Zelfontspanner is Dutch for self timer. I would say the series is a combination of the two. In this series I tried to catch the common Chinese having a day off during the 60th year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 2009. In my point of view, the Chinese seem to be always working, I mean, at least half of what I own is made in China. I wanted to see what the people, who seem to work non-stop, would be doing when most of them suddenly share a week off. For me photography is translating onto film (or sensor, at times) what I come across as good as I can. I take a lot of photos of architecture; it doesn’t move around too much and I can wait until the light is at it’s best to take a shot. When I have the time (and when I do not) I take my time to compose an image, since I think that is also what photography is, instead of needing software to upgrade what I’ve shot to really make it work. If I screw up, I just go back and do it again. Even though I’m happy with the photos I took in China, I probably will go there again.»

Flapping Wings

The photographic survey of the multifaceted artist Simon Vahala is one that leaves no escape. The reasons are well described in the unpublished text of Karolina Dolanska from which we extracted the writing below. An emotional interpretation of the geography collected by Czech photographer through an introspective as much as an aesthetic inquiry that, in making imperfection the rule, reveals this essential ingredient of normality. A series of landscapes, undoubtedly human, leaving the viewer hanging in a limbo of uncertain thoughts.

«Instantly, a complete silence overcomes us. It is not the kind of silence in the absence of words - in their suspense, when expecting them to come and to explain - but silence of a world where words never existed and never will. It is a silence of things that simply just happen, with no one noticing or caring. The subject ? Nature inscribed by human intervention, perhaps. But here, these signs come out positive, as signs of culture, where human beings are equal to nature, where nature and culture are two sides of the same coin, not fighting, but living together, complementing one another. In this world we understand that human enterprise exists for a reason, and that there is an angle of viewing it from where it comes out noble and monumental - in its clear technical functionality – noble and monumental like nature that surrounds it. The works of art we are dealing with here are not politically loaded in the fashionable sense of the word, i.e. when it is known to all of us in advance what one is to think and to feel and we can phrase it as to why exactly things are so. Here, in silence that tunes us to the frequency of a butterfly flapping its wings while flying, we do not know how to put into words what we feel. That allows the feeling to stay with us and live its own life even when we no longer look at a specific photograph at hand.»

The Invisible Cities

Approaching the indispensible work of Giustino Chemello, his exclusive way of representing reality that almost purifies it by distilling its ultimate essence, though subject to many interpretations, means standing before a window opened upon an essentially inner dimension, shaped by thoughts and memories of everyone, rather than by contingency. In this case, more appropriate than others, the key word is poetry, as he likes to emphasize. «Poetry as the highest form of illusion, salvific, for living life in the knowledge of death and suffering.» Images that speak of a man who is all men, of a world caught, shaped, and then returned as never seen before, new because it is beyond time, known and shared because absolute. «We move on the edge of ambiguity», Chemello adds, «but with awareness, far from superficiality», seizing any excuse to stage pure individual visions, refined by any «fastidious residual» of reality, to be, at last, «contemporary like a stone.»

Lateral view

Sometimes we can absent mindedly suspend time and what we see turns into a smooth and homogeneous landscape, where reference points are scarce if not almost useless. If this way of looking becomes routine then the area may lose its dimensions to the point of dissolving or may become a kind of repetitive scenery, like song that we listen to without paying attention to its words. The project of the Turkish/English photographer seems to break this type of spell. His images appear as pauses necessary for memory. The use of black and white resets the time and leaves us to contemplate the marginal world which supports the vacuum left by our passage and that of other commuters. So the irrelevant becomes memory and, perhaps, nostalgia. Kerim Aytaç makes us breathe, if only for a moment.

«The trajectory of a commute. A journey of many, glanced at. The travelling city, scrolling, is hard to decipher. Existence seemingly its only purpose, the Commuter sees this space, looking for a story or a memory, but it will not yield. Proof is all there is; proof these spaces need to be tracked and that they need to be there, between home and work, work and home. In this project I sought to encompass the subjectivity of the commuter, through a focus on the ambiguous spaces travelled through each day. The images attempt to reclaim the lost, still moments one easily ignores but that can act as testimony to the state of contemporary existences.»

Conscious living

Defining Gloria Chung as a photographer is certainly futile or probably reductive. Just a quick glance at her projects, daily posts or video tracks shows how each media adopted is just one means to view space and acquire its meanings. A field of investigation that, far from technicalities, covers various forms and manifestations of land use. Almost anthropological representations which capture the different scales of human action and undeniably, unmask their tacit aspects. The glossy underground visions of Seoul, the narrow and stifling working conditions of some anonymous workshops, and the varied aerial geography of the series “Flights”. Among her works the one that best reflects the photographer’s ability to empathize with the environment is “Elka Park”. Just a casual glance is sufficient to understand the intimate nature of this story and the strong sensitivity of its author, a quality that is essential to read the land and to write about it.

«No television, no radio, no phone service, no internet connection. It took a while to get used to the silence of being away from the city, but the sounds of nature and of a house itself can be quite striking, especially when one is isolated. Taking photos for this project, I was more aware of sounds and of silence than I’ve ever been. Just in and around the house itself is a creek running; a rundown shack with a half-hanging door; beehives; creaking trees; loose window frames; mice; wind chimes; footsteps hiking through the woods; crackling wood in the fireplace or fire pit outside; far-off sounds of speeding cars, dogs barking, hawks screeching, hunters’ guns, jetliners overhead; thunderstorms; in the winter I’ve imagined that I can hear the snow falling. These are the only sounds I hear for a few days and I become almost hypnotized.»

Absent presences

The photographic survey of Danilo Murru plunges us inside the prison walls, that clearly from its title, refers to the narrow and sharp words of Mexican poet, Octavio Paz. A story that seems to follow a meaning that is yet to come. A search that proceeds through the empty sequence of doors, windows and gates. Antiseptic environments, confined spaces, flat colors, rigid geometry, absent presences. A silent labyrinth that hides infinite directions and lives that are revealed when the photographer is able to cross their threshold. It is by apprehensively surveying the cells, where each prisoner is allowed to grow his own fantasies rather than hopes, that we finally see the light. A light nearly universal, weightless and smooth, that enters from the outside almost prohibitively to exonerate and redeem the past. A light that slowly releases the everyday references. Naked desires, a basket of apples, a soccer flag, blankets and books, a model of a sailing ship. Indiscreetly we reveal the objects through which time becomes a friend and thoughts are hidden.

Another black Sunday

It must have been hard for the photographer Kirk Crippens to intimately enter the spaces abandoned by American families affected by the popping of the real estate bubble. It’s like treading on an open wound. There is a silence that masks the underlying frustration, anger, disappointment, and shock, but also remaining there are the traces of millions of betrayed domestic hopes. An unavoidable document that sheds light on a widespread drama and seems to want to fill the vacuum left by indifference.

«In the last three years, the distress induced by widespread foreclosures in the United States has become an urgent national concern. There is much public discourse on how to solve the problem that has decimated communities, threatens the entire financial system, and seems to discredit the American dream. Inspired by the lasting impact of the dust bowl photographs from the Great Depression, Foreclosure, USA documents the town of Stockton, California, which is often referred to as the ‘epicenter’ of the foreclosure crisis to illustrate some of the causes and effects of the current financial crisis. Stockton enjoyed a spectacular housing boom from 2000 to 2006. Housing developments eagerly pressed into the surrounding farmland – then suddenly stopped in their tracks when the credit dried up. Sadly, Stockton is now one of the foreclosure capitals of the United States. While working on this project in 2009, one in twenty-seven homes in the area received a foreclosure notice and the unemployment rate surged to 17.1% - and continued to rise to 18.3% as of March 2010. The photographs in this series serve as quiet witness to the Great Recession.»

The drowning man

The whole work of Carlos Albalá moves with subtle differences through a sort of twilight zone, a region seemingly remote and marginal when compared to the known world that rests on the solid foundations of habits, and is made up of places firmly anchored to everyday human activities. In the urban periphery usually explored by the Spanish photographer, the temporal dimension seems to be jammed, almost piling up, and is replaced by an empty suspension that is typical of places in ruins, often fragments of a future so close that we could assume it to be a kind of archeology of the present. When the black of the unknown invades these spaces to become matter itself, as in the recent series “From Nowhere Onwards”, then it becomes almost impossible to find a chink in the dark and not to be afraid of what is waiting for us, frightening and stealthy, somewhere, out there. The objects, the rooms that contain them, the same places from which to flee, as memories and regrets, and perhaps even hopes and what still needs to happen, everything is left behind and lost, in the night.

Unusual revelations

What remains of a tree, a dog looking out of the window, a white picket fence, a misplaced palm tree, a garden slightly weird, a deflated Santa Claus, a tattered chair. Of this and more consists the visual poetry of Sarah Lemoncelli. A fabulous tale, made up of little joys and domestic situations, where the details hide entire lives, and seem able to diminish the everyday world of beliefs and illusions, and to shake us discreetly. It is a world perhaps a bit cloying, but that still amazes and makes us smile.

«We live in a land of strivers. We fight for a place. We push ourselves to go bigger, faster, better.
We climb toward the elusive mountain top of the American dream. The small moments carved out of that struggle, the tiny cuts of orientation, introspection and evaluation are what allows one to observe behavior and ask questions. It is in these bits of intermission that we learn the most about the journey we are on.»

New totems

Signs of time, of memory. Signs on the streets. Marquis Palmer attempts to integrate geography starting from objects. An ordinary object that in his interpretation becomes a symbolic element, almost a depiction of the need to abstract significance from the surface to better contextualize the tacit meaning. Palmer’s path looks a bit like that of a collector who tries to give a different value to things, a much more subjective one, to make sure that the time behind him was not futile.

«Behind the Signs can be seen as a documentation of places that I’ve left behind. The information on the front of the sign can only be seen by those going in the opposite direction. Therefore, seen by those going to places that I’ve left behind. By photographing the back’s of signs I deliberately deprive the viewer of the information and force him to see the sign as an almost sculpturesque object within it’s environment. The series is a kind of trivial pursuit that has me searching for beauty in an otherwise ordinary and superfluous object.»

Sweeping epic

In the contemporary society to master a space is also a way to approach history and what we are. Scott Conarroe does this through photography. His work, which inherently favours larger sizes, highlights the desire to embrace the territory and its multiple meanings, thus to recount the story of culture. The railway becomes a pretext to bring together the history of a large country. The abundance of details is reflected in the richness of narrative elements from which emerge a personality other than that of the photographer. The places appear to be chosen for their significance and become the basis for seeking his own aesthetic of contemporary landscape far from easy exhibitionism and controversy.

«By Rail is a survey of North America’s rail infrastructure. It is part elegy, somber and romantic, as the Golden Age of Industrialization recedes; part study of the culture left behind. In it the tracks are a unifying device that maintain a type of constancy throughout vast expanses of land, swings in culture, and numerous time zones. North America was developed in tandem with rail technologies; in the east immigrants and civil war veterans constructed the First Transcontinental Railway and from the Pacific
prodigious Chinese labour forced lines through mountains, Canadian confederation was contingent upon a coast-to-coast link, and population growth accelerated the decline of native controlled territories. By Rail depicts a civilization poised between history and what will become of it. The last image in this series was taken in January 2009 when, among other things, Barack Obama was the first American president-elect since 1953 to arrive in Washington by rail.»

Fear of the void

The ever existing human need to know and dominate the planet, to draw maps and give our own names even to the most inaccessible and unreachable places is very much like a primal and indelible fear. Those signs are not meant to mark our passage, but a confirmation of our own existence, as if to carve a name, a date or a pierced heart in the trunk of a tree could protect us from being forgotten. Paradoxical from a impeccably logical point of view, the idea that a place that is not known, experienced, or lived in doesn’t exist can carry the same sense of anguish and loss that is portrayed in Daniel Augschöll’s series. A refined and somewhat difficult reading so that this primordial fear can to be avoided. But if we let ourselves be led by the hand of the young Berlin photographer to the edge of this black hole, we can catch a glimpse of the bottom, of the unnamed emptiness that lies between nature as such and a dense web made of traces, signs and impressions, intentional or inadvertent, that make it “human” and therefore real, finally part of the known world, safe again.