«The photographic project» tell us the architect Andrea Bosio describing his series Home Sweet Home «starts from the observation of the complex and rigid structure of the contemporary city. Each area has its function and every resident has his role within it. However, there are lacerations in this mesh, both in the urban and social level: it is precisely in these interstices of evanescent reality that some people find “self made” rescue footings. I am speaking of those people who by choice or for unrelated reasons find themselves without a real social position and homeless. Nearly transparent and strangers to the city, this people live in more or less marginal areas of the metropolis. The pavement is usually their bed, sometimes a bench… The most enterprising build their selves a refuge in the shade of the buildings between the spaces defined by the local urban planning. Paradoxical situations of the consumerist and globalized society: small huts built with recycled materials behind shopping centers or buildings symbolic buildings. I began to travel the city far and wide in search of these “parasites” realities that smoothly exploit the areas that the city has forgotten. I collected different images but as chance would have it the project took a new turn. Returning to the scene of previous shots, I ran in the ‘absence’ of the subjects: the sudden urban transformations has swept these areas, invading with yards or parkings the territories of illegal tenants and removing their houses.»

The reality is no doubt cultural representation, a mirror of our selves as expressions of a society. The landscape does not lie after all. And, probably, the Canadian photographer David Pollock is right when he reminds us in the introduction to his writing that the virtual experience enable a widespread access but it still means a loss in the richness of details.

«The pictures are primarily meant to present everyday world in a manner that reveals our involvement in a world of symbols. Many of the images reflect our symbolic representations of the natural world in a constructed landscape and connect to images of paradise(paradise is often depicted as a garden (cultured nature). I think the symbol of Adam and Eve’s fall is the fall from the protection of culture and the consequent resulting consciousness of their own mortality. These ideas are influenced by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker and his 1974 Pulitzer prize winning book “Denial of Death” which changed the way I see the world. I live in a tourist environment and link photography and tourism (the ‘tourism industry’ and photography are profoundly connected) that alludes to our world of images and consequent framing of realty. Susan Sontag said this over 30 years ago: “Photography makes everyone a tourist in everyone elses’ reality and eventually in ones’ own”.»

We like to return on Chris Mottalini’s portfolio, after having written about his series Mistake By The Lake, to report a curious as unprecedented evolution in his expressive research toward a constructivism of reality and more especially of nature. A nature ambiguosly represented and contaminated through the introduction of natural yet indigenous elements. A manipulation occasionally made even more explicit by the presence of extraneous and artificial objects. Mottalini chooses a smaller scale to draw and interpret, in a personal way, a very common theme. He offers us a soft vision, less impressive and insidious, however, symbolic of human action on the environment. And it seems that these microrealities placed in the foreground by Mottalini and originated from a personal experience, that of subscribing to a mineral club, deliberately pose unresolved questions. In this sense we rediscover Mottalini’s style, that explores the unexpected with ease, and leaves the viewer a residual room of interpretation.

No city is ever the same. In part because like any organism it grows and changes over time and partly because no matter how hard you look it will never be enough to see it all. The work of René Schmalschälger in this sense is an investigation that reflects the desire to discover a city and its myriad representations.

«By photographing the city I’m describing the people that build it, the city as the handwriting of human action. What and where I photograph is part random ‒ just happen to be there ‒ and part rational ‒ dropping myself into a chosen area. By avoiding people in the photos, I avoid the automatic emotional reactions that people have to other people. Using an abstract aesthetics, I seek to help the viewer to stay away from clichéd associations, irony, cynicism, sarcasm or social statements, because they often are rooted in platitudes. A city is a place where the largest portion of the space is private. The private space is where people feel free to be themselves, as opposed to the public space where they have to be social. In the public space, instincts and reflexes are activated by interaction with others, by projecting desires and fears on others. At the same time, to be social is also a need every person feels. So in a way, the public space can be both a prison and a refuge. There is no private or public in a zoo. The Barcelona zoo is an old-fashioned one. Animals are in small spaces and in direct contact with people. Visitors can feel there distress and start to feel sorry for the animals. To a great extent, it is the design of the zoo that evokes the emotion.»

Landfills, dams, manufacturing and housing units, yards, quarries, railway tracks, overpasses, marginal areas, scrap, functions and transformations impacting territories, questionable land use methods, these are the geographic portraits of photographer Jason Koxvold. With a compassionate, patient, cynical but always elegant look he explores aware the landscapes of the transition from the abandoned Detroit to the postcomunist suburbs, from the bulimic Asia to the Japanese hyper productivity. A schizophrenic mosaic that reproduces a Lilliputian land, a swarm of activities, buildings, and views, dense, frenetic and often gray. Whose land we wonder.

«My interest in landscapes grew from a need to explore man’s desire to control his environment - to tame nature. We have a remarkable need to make things rectangular and paint them black, white, or beige. This process of changing the land is sometimes incredibly rapid, at other times so slow that it’s almost imperceptible. These moments of change often go unseen or unnoticed; in documenting it, I find a lot of intersections between the beauty of the image and the cynicism in the observation.»

«A recent mission to Mars sent back to Earth amazingly clear photographs of the planet’s landscape.» Tamir Sher seems to jokingly provoke when he introduce his artistic project “Mars.” His visual alterations, however, tell of familiar images made deliberately alien. Not a trivial attempt to appropriate reality and edit it to his liking, but the desire to make universal what is daily taken for granted. A fence, a building, a prefabricated, a cemetery, symbolically become iconic pieces of a landscape fragmented, disconnected and often deprived of its identity. Places that seem to belong to us to a certain point, beyond which they enter into a flat and absolute dimension, where boundaries and proportions, certainties and conclusions disappear. «Below, the artificial ephemera of our world. Above, the natural ethernity of the universe.» A dark and extinguished night that almost paradoxically enhances the light and the shapes of the day, making them more vivid, less banal and somehow different. A visual contrast that drives us to be less indifferent to our environment?

It is perhaps characteristic of the Portuguese people, always looking out to the sea, to scan the horizon for new directions towards which pushing themselves, leaving behind what is most reassuring and defined, sending further goals and expectations. Photographer João Henriques is not immune from this tendency as he himself tells us.

In “Capital Reflex” I tried to find images that could be used as a metaphor to the current state of the Portuguese scene. Despite the title it should concern not only economical aspects, but also suggest a larger frame that would include social, political and other aspects as well, as a reconnaissance that everything is interconnected. Most of these dynamics are common with other cultures and countries so if language could be a barrier to a more global identity, images might break that obstacle driving us to a realm of shared experience. In a more inward approach, landscape or the local are here seen as places of projection of expectations, conventions and preconceived notions, that can be defined not only by its mediation and “mediatisation”, but also through an experiential relationship. The aim of using man altered landscapes and places is to tap the potential of the image both as a document and as a trigger of emotions.

The first impression is of entering a movie set on a postnuclear stage. Objects and things seem so out of place that the vision proceeds uncertain in an almost surreal atmosphere. A work that runs on the thread of ambiguity and proceeds jerkily through small clues that only at the end, thanks to the author’s words, we can gather in a story. The place is real, and it is on this disorienting perceptual effect that Kuletsky builds his photographic tale. We are at Solotvyno in Ukraine about 300 meters below ground. What once was a salt mine is now home to a clinic for respiratory diseases. Here people come to cure asthma and other bronchial and bronchioles disorders. Is called speleotherapy, tells us Kuletsky, and was discovered in Poland in the 1950’s when some scientists noticed that people who worked in salt mines rarely suffered from tuberculosis. Satisfied with this geography lesson we can now going back to the photos and start all over again our trip thorugh the tunnels and spaces of the underground clinic, smiling to ourselves and to our hasty conclusions. We are comforted by the fact that for once, the imagination has prevailed over reality.

Urbanautica is a research platform centered on photography and the human landscapes. A navigation by sight, a trip around the ideas, people and what makes them part of nature and the world. Established through a website with the aim of promoting a critical reflection on “ways of doing, territories, cities, planet”, has already received a fair recognition among photographers, magazines, blogs and websites from all over the world. Urbanautica publish each month a selection of international photographers who develop artistic research topics and fine art works on landscape, urban transformations, citizenship, pollution, abandoned places and relationship with nature.

Urbanautica is also present with a facebook page where we daily feature brief information on exhibitions, books, blogs, sites related to photography and landscape. For Urbanautica’s latest favorites and entries check the new flickr group.

This would never have been possible without the support of Andrea Filippin faithful and tireless writer. Recently, important was the contribution of other people including Gianpaolo Arena, Massimiliano Foytik, Pietro Costa and Kaymir Stark.

Send us your website, project or a series you would like to be featured. Images are to be sent at 72 dpi and 26 cm width (25 cm for medium format). An author’s comment is always welcome…

We wish to see URBANAUTICA growing as a “hub”, such as a large container and dispenser of contacts, suggestions and ideas. This is why we do not sell photographs, neither we pay or are paid for the images or texts published. For each photographer we insert all the credits and the useful links. With regards to the projects and series presented the choice is at our discretion, meaning sometimes the sacrifice of “beautiful photos” for a coherence with the central issues we addressed. The featured projects are the result of our research, eventhough we receive several submissions that we are happy to evaluate from time to time. We do not take in consideration portraits, commercial, fashion or those things as we are sticked to our research. By the way we are interested in art and conceptual deviations from the main theme as probable evolutions of landscape photography.