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.

The Scandinavian shots of David Salvi are the result of a long and romantic style research that feeds sentimentally on reality. A kind of obsession that, as the photographer suggests us, becomes «inspiration made of sounds, and smells, long thoughts and extreme attention to details. There are millions, billions and there are many more unknown to me.» A sensibility that is translated into an approach to life: «observing the reality through a lens makes me feel protected, makes me feel unattainable, and according to my mood I feel able to take what I want, and to discard the rest. I hardly try to create the necessary conditions to bring in a picture a thought or a precise scene. I have always preferred to seek the original version elsewhere, so that I can feel and touch it personally, immortalizing it to my taste.» Snapshots with no post production return us respectfully northern atmospheres strictly on medium format. «Maybe a little too forcefully I joined a “square” perspective that now I can not imagine otherwise.»

There is no doubt that the places photographed by Karin Borghouts are real. Yet their being in perfect balance between reality and imagination takes the viewer aback, raises doubts and curiosity. Reverse on the viewer an inescapable sense of alienation that lasts for long and is reinforced by the image that follows, giving a complete sense to this surprising series, and together multiplying its countless possibilities of interpretation. The more ambiguous and misleading arise the images the more precise and flawless is the gaze of the Belgian photographer, that becomes itself a “builder” of places, a not entirely objective witness of some kind of staged nature, subjected to a mere tool of composition. Fragments of an everyday reality, intended as such only if they are fully seized, are juxtaposed and aligned as individual characters to form new meaningful sentences, resulting in a language that does not tell of public spaces, zoos and amusement parks anymore, but the relationship between reality and the viewer, irretrievably placed into question. References to art history, to painting in particular, and to set design, help to fuel this kind of unsolvable riddle, between indisputable truths and illusions, between the pure perception and the certainty of being part of a well-known world.