Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti

Text and photos by Twelve-Tone Photography.

Sometime the production of artwork follows convoluted if not downright bizarre paths. This is the recount of one such artwork, that we have organized as a four-stage process, because it developed and reached completion in four distinct phases over a period of six years.

Rocks in Five Parts< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

Phase 1 – The Subject

All our visits to the American South-West were profoundly emotional. We have lived for almost two decades in the US and this gave us the opportunity to explore the area in some depth. We have seen it at different times of the year: from the searing hot August days in the pink sand dunes of Yuma to the blooming season in Death Valley. The American South-West is all but a monolithic visual experience: Monument Valley and Moab, or Bryce Canyon and the Valley of the Gods, have little in common from a sensory perception. In spite of these significantly different sceneries they all impressed upon us similar emotions: a fundamental sense of disorientation, vertigo, lack of mooring, a compass gone wild. Mind you, this experience was not unsettling, it felt like a suspension of time and peaceful relinquishing of one’s comfort zone.

The Valley of The Gods 01< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

One particular place was instrumental in making us feel this way. The first time that we visited the Valley of the Gods these emotions overwhelmed us. This is a place out of the classical tourist routes — one can be alone there, and we mean totally alone, with the surroundings. Afterwards we were able to experience the same sensations elsewhere as well, although in a less dramatic way. Once this “symphonic fortissimo” was played for us in the Valley of the Gods we were able to experience it — although at a lower volume — in the Grand Canyon, in Moab, or Bryce.

Of course we took lots of pictures, but later we were not totally satisfied: looking at them did not evoke the same sensory experience. The disorientation, vertigo, suspension of time, lack of mooring were simply not there. The pictures were silent. Yes, they faithfully depicted what we had seen but did not resonate.

Bryce Canyon 01< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

Phase 2 – The Intuition

We share a passion for contemporary classical music. It all started in our college years when we were living in Milan, Italy. At the time the city, in cooperation with the local Music Academy, was organising yearly concerts as part of a program entitled “Music in Our Times” (MiOT). For several years the program offered concerts of all the major contemporary composers, from Stockhausen to Berio, from Penderecki to Ligeti. Some attention was also given to American composers out of the classical mainstream: first of all Cage, who gave a memorable performance, but also Steve Reich and Terry Riley. These concerts were the spark that set in motion our personal journey through contemporary classical music: we attended workshops in computer music at CNUCE in Pisa (Boulez’ IRCAM in Paris opened shortly thereafter), became familiar with minimalism, and even visited some musicians whose music impressed us. We still remember a young Gavin Bryars opening the door of his London flat and looking both puzzled and amused at this couple of Italian students telling him how much they loved his “Sinking of the Titanic.”

The Valley of The Gods 06< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

Our love for contemporary music made us think in recent years about the reasons why some parameters are kept invariant in artistic expression, often for no reason other than tradition. We asked ourselves what would happened in photography if one denied this invariance, the consequences one had to face and what could be found at the end of the tunnel that one enters when these invariances are simply made variable. Our natural point of reference was atonal music. The destruction of the invariance of tonality that contemporary music produced from Schönberg onward has been a driving force of much classical music (albeit not all) of the last century. Much could be said about it — there is an extensive literature on this topic — but one thing is certain: the jury is still out. What has happened in the 20th century may turn out to be — once filtered by time — nothing more that a cataclysmic event in the progression of musical development that has left traces — more or less profound — but few memorable compositions. Conversely, it may leave lots of masterpieces that audiences worldwide will enjoy listening to for centuries to come. Steve Reich seems to believe in the former outcome, when he says: 

The reality of cadence to a key or modal center is basic in all the music of the world (Western and non Western). This reality is also related to the primacy of the intervals of the fifth, fourth, and octave in all the world’s music as well as in the physical acoustics of sound. Similarly for the regular rhythmic pulse. Any theory of music that eliminates these realities is doomed to a marginal role in the music of the world. The postman will never whistle Schönberg. This does not mean Schönberg was not a great composer — clearly he was. It does mean that his music (and the music like his) wlll always inhabit a sort of “dark little corner” off by itself in the history of all the world’s music.¹

Whether atonal music will inhabit a dark little corner in the history of world’s music is outside the scope of this article and we certainly do not have the competence to provide any significant contribution to the topic. This notwithstanding, we became curious about the similarity to photography, now that digital photography (remember computer music?) has potentially broken some technical constraints. There are two major invariants in photography: color temperature and exposure. They are kept constant across the whole image field. We have found our “musical key,” therefore, and applied it to photography. The next step was to ask ourselves what would happen if we made both be variable. We expect many agree about the invariance of color temperature, while many will strongly object when reading about the invariance of exposure. Yes, yes, we hear you saying: “and what about dodging and burning? And what about HDR?” Indeed, they change the exposure in selected places (the former) or across the whole image field (the latter). But these are tools to address (perceived) visual issues, not a methodology to free the parameter of light intensity reaching the sensitive surface from an imposed, specific initial value. We stand by our statement that dodging, burning or HDR are something else. 

Moab 06< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

Phase 3 – Applying the Intuition

We called this process of imposing variability to color temperature and exposure photosequencing. While we never forgot even for a moment what Reich said above, and without having the arrogance of comparing photosequencing to atonal music, we do believe that the former will certainly occupy some (very) little dark corner. We do not think it is a new way of picture taking, nor will it ever become one. But Twelve-Tone Photography’s mission is also about carrying out visual research applied to photography, and this is one of the many experiments we performed. We discuss it here since it produced artwork and solved a specific problem at the same time, and hence it is worth reporting.

The process of modifying color temperature is rather straightforward: we considered a range from 1000K to about 14000K. In fact, the sensitivity of the eye to color temperature variation is not linear with Kelvin degrees but with mired.  We therefore converted Kelvin degrees into mired and divided the latter in twelve segments. These are the twelve color filters we applied to our pictures. After much experimentation we also decided that the best shape for each filter was a rectangle. Before we tried with circles, or various irregular shapes, but the results were visually unconvincing. A similar (even simpler) process has been applied to exposure, subdividing the EV space into twelve. In this case a rectangle has also turned out to be the preferable shape. 

Moab Triptych< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

Phase 4 – The Result

The next step was to decide where and how to apply photosequencing. This is when we focused on our project about the American South-West. The rationale behind it was quite pragmatic: we loved these places and longed for the emotions we had experienced, but as we said above the pictures did not embody them yet. 

The results intrigued us. The pictures were finally resonating. The emotions we had felt on location could be at long last be felt by looking at the photographs: disorientation, mild hallucination, a crazy compass, time distortion and a sense of suspension were all there in front of us. These pictures finally spoke to us. We called this project “Deconstructing the American South-West,” for rather obvious reasons.

The Valley of The Gods 09< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

Photosequencing forces time into a picture by its own very characteristics, i.e., modulating exposure and color temperature, hence mimicking the day passing by (though in a fragmented way).  Sometime this can be useful, as it was in this project. So far we have used photosequencing in another project where make-believe is a primary goal and its application appropriate and justified. We may not apply it anywhere else in the future, though: when its presence is clearly justified — as we believe was the case of “Deconstructing the American South-West” — the benefits largely outweigh its extremely strong visual signature; the latter in fact — if not carefully managed — can initially attract the viewer with its chromatic abundance yet also hide shapes and forms too much.

We champion non-visual sensations in our photography as a way to expand the viewer’s experience to include more than what is visible on the surface, and to suggest other intangible, non-visual elements that inhabited the scene being captured. In “Deconstructing the American South-West” the searing heat, the fuzziness, the breeze, the flickering before one’s eyes, the subtle feeling of unbalance, and ultimately the possibility to feel either happily lost or happily immersed in this immensity of space were integral part of being there. Thus, we felt that our project was now complete.

Monument Valley 01< /br>© Twelve-Tone Photography
Please visit Deconstructing the American South-West, by Marco Annaratone and Hanni Cerutti for the full size image.

1. Steve Reich, Writings on Music 1965-2000, Edited by Paul Hiller, Oxford University Press, 2002, p.186-187.

Text and photos by Max Sher.

Map and Territory

I was born in St. Petersburg, then Leningrad, and, at the age of 11, moved with my father to Kemerovo, a Soviet-built industrial city in West Siberia. Almost every summer, I used to travel back to St. Pete to stay with my grandparents, and I remember roaming the area where they lived with a Soviet map of the city – wittingly incorrect and lacking many streets including the one where my grandparents’ house was located. It should be said that normal, detailed city maps were hard to get during Soviet era. Back in Kemerovo, there was no city map available at all until late 1990s. I started putting the missing streets on my map of St Petersburg. Then I began exploring other neighbourhoods and putting the missing streets on the map as well. I was constructing, unconsciously of course, my own mental map of the city, thus symbolically defying the State image (‘map’) of the territory.

Dubna, March 31, 2010, 56°44′37.33″N, 37°10′16.43″E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

Moscow, February 6, 2013, 55°44′33.92″N, 37°48′56.4″E
© Max Sher
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Travel and photography change your mental image of the place. It’s a cliché to say Russia is huge and it is – in purely mechanical terms of the area it covers. But if we travel and photograph where people live and where there is culture or industry, this image of hugeness shrinks dramatically. During Soviet era, the geographical map of the ‘sixth part of the world’ was one of the sacred tools of power. At the former czar’s Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, a huge map of the Soviet Union made of gems had been installed where the imperial throne once stood. When I was kid it was still there.

Moscow, February 16, 2013, 55°48′4.33″N, 37°36′56.23″E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

The role and image of traveler and photographer in Russia also changed dramatically over the last one hundred years. The pre-1917 Russian photographers were private entrepreneurs who had a relative freedom of what to look at and photograph. Many of them produced picture postcards as part of their business, and these postcards depicted not only ‘attractive’ places but also prisons, factories, alms-houses or hospitals for the poor. This interest towards the everyday culture was effectively banned after the 1917 revolution. Photography was harnessed as a tool of propaganda and very soon, a certain matrix of representation took shape while attempts to picture the everyday routine began to be seen as subversive and treacherous. The image of the country was effectively reduced to that map at the Winter Palace. Traveling around the country became severely restricted as well. Many cities like Vladivostok or Kronstadt were sealed off even to Russians. The Benjaminian figure of the flâneur – inseparable from the image of the contemporary photographer – became virtually impossible. Moving around the country was only available to those employed by the State – military, officials, journalists, or scientists. Freelancing was illegal. Taking pictures in the street was equal to spying. All this, it seems, was one of the reasons for an almost complete absence of photographic work focusing on inhabited landscapes as a subject matter between 1917 and late 1980s. Very few images survive of how our cities looked and felt like, and changed during that time.

Smolensk, May 17, 2013, 54°47′58.15″N, 32°2′56.32″E
© Max Sher
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St. Petersburg, July 23, 2012, 59°51′48.93″N, 30°29′52.21″E
© Max Sher
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Today’s photographic practice still faces a lot of restrictions although incommensurable with the Soviet times. It is still technically prohibited to photograph railway bridges, for example, or to travel to the so-called ‘border zones’ without getting permission from the KGB successor agency FSB. The latter is all the more absurd that you can easily avoid it: once there, you get detained by border police, pay a 10-dollar fine and are allowed to stay on. That means still control for the sake of control.

Vereya, January 6, 2013, 55°20′37.9″N, 36°11′6.81″E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

To photograph my landscapes I am often looking for elevated vantage points. By taking photographs therefrom I symbolically appropriate, privatise the viewpoint, the image and thus the territory that were tightly controlled as recently as a couple of decades ago. At the same time, these vantage points provide the necessary distance, both physical and metaphorical.

Zhavoronki, September 8, 2012, 55°38′31.2″N, 37°5′58.67″E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

Russia as America

The main question of course is how to depict the Russian inhabited landscape today. I use this word – inhabited – because the term ‘landscape’ in our culture mostly refers to the pictures of natural scenery and not to places where people live. Interestingly, a Russian city is often considered ‘nice’ for the nature that surrounds it, not for urban environment or architecture. Since most of our cities are generally considered ‘ugly’, this perceived ugliness as well as many other unpleasant realities of our everyday life alienate many Russians from their own cities. We just do not consider them ours.

Smolensk, May 17, 2013, 54°47′57.35″N, 32°2′12.49″E
© Max Sher
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Smolensk, May 17, 2013, 54°47′7.83″N, 32°1′11.52″E
© Max Sher
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What I’m trying to do in my project is to bring out all the influences – from the 19 century Russian landscape painting and photography to Soviet-era postcards to New Topographics and Google Street View – that help define today’s visual vocabulary through which to look at and make sense of our landscape. What matters to me is the idea of a certain type of optics – focusing on the unnoticed elements of our living environment. It is very effective as a tool to accept and face the reality, to demystify it in a way. We need to look at our country the way American photographers look at theirs. Explore, record, accept, love it.

Moscow, February 16, 2013, 55°48′1.16″N, 37°36′56.04″E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

Strange as it is, Russia has always been at loss for a detached, calm representation of itself because of either censorship (control of the image) or over-politicising / over-romanticising on the part of both the state bureaucracy and the educated classes (as noted by Vyacheslav Glazychev¹). While the state propaganda fed us with feel-good images and that gorgeous ‘map’ of a mighty empire, the ‘democratic’ image was supposed to ‘tell the truth’ or struggle for an abstract ‘common good’. I want to liberate the documentary photographic vision from both biases to aestheticise the ‘ugly’ to make it enter our consciousness. It’s nothing new, even in Russia, if we remember what the pre-1917 Russian photographers looked at and photographed. The point is: this is how Russia looks like, let’s face it, and let’s treat it as ours.

Vereya, January 6, 2013, 55°20′37.9″N, 36°11′6.81″E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

Voronezh, July 1, 2013, 51°39′52.23″N, 39°12′42.12″E
© Max Sher
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Russian Palimpsest

So, why Russian Palimpsest? The title of my project suggests an image of the landscape as a multi-layered medium, written, erased and re-written upon over time. Basically, every landscape – American, European or Russian – is a palimpsest. But to my mind, our post-Utopian territory is a palimpsest par exellence where very little ‘shows through’ after the previous layer has been erased and is being rewritten upon. Despite a thousand-year-old history, this country collapsed twice in less than 80 years, first abolishing all the institutions of the past and the past itself to form a sort of an isolated apocalyptic sect (as defined by Boris Groys²), then dissolving this sect, only to find itself between the Future where it has already been and the Past where it had already been too, completely disoriented. As a result, our landscape presents an unbelievable pileup of ill-thought-out cities, top-down development projects hastily implemented without much prior analysis, poor infrastructure, childish architecture, and that famous feeling of impermanence, precariousness, and unrootedness, so ‘rooted’ in our identity. What might be the role of photography here? Catalog it! Of course, you can never make a full catalog of anything, even less so of something constantly evolving but a catalog of landscapes is possible. What should be included in it? In Russia, as in America, the only possible catalog of landscapes, I believe, is the one compiled from random images with something more in them than mere archetypes. I’m looking for images that convey a spatial sensation of the country, when you can say: hey, that’s Russia of our time. This is what I mean by demystification.

Podrezkovo, February 17, 2013, 55°56′32.59″N, 37°19′32.85″E
© Max Sher
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Ulan Bator, April 28, 2013, 47°25' 4.54"N, 108°12' 35.42"E
© Max Sher
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All photographs are captioned with the name of the place, date and exact geographical coordinates suggesting an open-ended diary-cum-catalogue of our time and living space.

For more photos and stories, please visit Max Sher website.

Ulan Bator, April 28, 2013, 47°54' 43.48"N, 106°54' 52.63"E
© Max Sher
Please visit Russian Palimpsest, by Max Sher for the full size image.

1. Vyacheslav Glazychev, Gorod bez granits, Territoriya Budushchego Publishers, Moscow, 2011, pp. 161-162.
2. Boris Groys, Politika poetiki, Ad Marginem Press, Moscow, 2012, p. 321.

Text by Marine Cabos, photos by Nadav Kander, Edward_Burtynsky and Ian Teh.

I have always enjoyed experiencing landscape as well as contemplating all sorts of pictorial representations of it. To me, depicting landscape is a mean by which a photographer attempts to understand the mystery of nature, while trying to understand his/her own place within it.

Chongqing I, Chongqing Municipality
© Nadav Kander
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

Although I do not have any kind of creative talent whatsoever, I have always been eager to watch, speak, and write about art. I guess this is one of the main reasons why I decided to plunge myself into Art History with a special focus on photography. Indeed over the past six years I developed a keen interest in photography and especially photography depicting China’s landscapes throughout the centuries.

Farmland. Linfen, Shanxi, China.
© Ian Teh
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Since then I could not stop searching for photographers that have extensively worked in China, whatever their origins. One day I came across the powerful artworks created by Edward Burynsky, Nadav Kander, and Ian Teh. When I saw their photographs for the first time, I immediately asked myself to what extend these Westerners can participate in the shaping of China’s image? One might find this question puzzling at first especially if one assumes natives would necessarily provide a “truer” gaze than outsiders. But to me (as for many people specialised in the field of photography of China) there is no such thing as a consensus in what constitute core elements of ‘Chinese photography’; instead I am more interested in the variations of photographers’ gaze through the depictions a common subject matter.

Bao Steel #8, Shanghai, 2005
© Edward Burtynsky
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These three photographers created compelling images representing China’s landscape in its largest sense. By that I mean their notion of landscape does not only refer to the natural world, but also to places that range from man-altered to industrial zone, cityscape, cultural landscapes and other types of sceneries. Let me introduce briefly what they managed to photograph when they were in China.

Chongqing II, Chongqing Municipality © Nadav Kander
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Over his twenty-five years career, the Canadian Edward Burtynsky (born in 1955 in Canada) developed keen eyesight of man-made alterations upon nature caused by the pursuit of modernization, which he conscientiously captured across Northern America. Burtynsky’s anxiety to engender the audience’s awakening of such disrupted sceneries leaded him to China, where he engaged in a series of photographs depicting human and environmental costs of the tremendous economic boom China is undergoing. For five years starting from 2002, Burtynsky explored the ‘Middle Country’ by scrutinising on the one hand the urban revolution with his series Urban Renewal, on the other by following the industrial production processes: from the collection of energy with his series on the Three Gorges Dam; the human labour with Manufacturing; the steel producers with Steel and Coal; the collapsed heavy industry due to mid-90s restructuring with Old Industry; the ships production in ports with Shipyards; to finally the recycling process with Recycling. His large-sized photographs offer a paradoxical commentary vacillating between deadpan and bleak impressions on the China’s changing landscape.

A new luxury residential development built next to a an industrial complex. Linfen, Shanxi, China.
© Ian Teh
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

Regarding Nadav Kander (born in 1961 in Israel), his contribution to the shaping of China’s landscape was also significant. His Yangtze series – which resulted from five trips initiated in 2006 – shows an interesting account that mingles the pictorial tradition of portraying the river sceneries, and an unavoidable social commentary about the unnatural development within natural settings and its consequences on the population. Although he tried as much as he could to maintain a distance because of his awareness of being an outsider, Kander ultimately re-enacted individual and collective sentiments of rootlessness commonly felt by not only the Chinese he met, but also himself as an Israeli-born South African living in England. His photographs propose a journey navigating by the river on traditional boats, walking across broken bridges, ending in nearby cities with leisured people.

China Recycling #9, Circuit Boards, Guiyu, Guangdong Province, 2004
© Edward Burtynsky
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

Finally, the Chinese-British Ian Teh (born in 1971; based in London) also experienced China since 2006 through a solo initiatory journey in which he wanted to discover the industrial hinterlands. His series Traces: Dark Clouds offers photographs of Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, Liaoning and other provinces across China. Teh chose these specific places for they revealed another side of the so-called ‘China’s miracle’: the environmental sacrifices of perfecting the country and their side effects left for the future generations. Apparently Teh continues to work on China according to three of his projects entitled Merging Boundaries (in which he looks into the Sino-Russian and Sino-Korean limits), The Vanishing – Altered Landscapes and Displaced Lives on the Yangtze River, Tainted Landscapes 1: Birth to a New Coal Power Station, and Tainted Landscapes 2: Heavy Industry in Linfen, China’s most Polluted City.

Chongqing XI, Chongqing Municipality
© Nadav Kander
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It was quite a shock to discover their work; needless to say that I immediately fell in love with them. At that time I just arrived in London and I was visiting randomly galleries near Old Street. I ended up in the Flowers Gallery where I had the chance to meet Chris Littlewood, the Director of Photography. I talked about these three photographers (who were all exhibited at least once in the gallery) and asked him if he thought they were creating divergent and/or similar representations of China. Chris replied that:

The riverbed of the Kuye River, a subsidiary to the Yellow River
© Ian Teh
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

“On the one hand they obviously explored a common subject, yet all possess a different gaze. Kander for instance took a very indirect, poetic, personal approach opposite to documentary considerations. His Yantze series reflected an atmosphere that embraced a wide range of sensations and feelings, such as alienation or sadness. Contrarily, Burtynsky’s gaze is direct, almost rough, highly distanced – literally and judgementally. The magnitude of his panoramic photographs mingled documentary and pictorial approach to landscape through which he strived to provoke sustainability awareness. As for Teh, his method to first spent days in the place in order to gain trust and proximity with the people, then taking photographs recall somehow journalistic practices. Ultimately, the trio engaged in a ‘China-centric’ photographic dialogue that possesses highly intuitive and pictorial dimensions, thus leading the viewer to be visually overwhelmed and trapped.”

Manufacturing #18, Cankun Factory, Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, 2005
© Edward Burtynsky
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

Chris’ insightful comments enhanced even more my passion about landscape photography of China. In truth although these three photographers belong to different cultures (thus assumedly possess dissimilar cultural conditioning) they nonetheless share astonishing similarities. First, they reify the timeless Western attraction for China cultural and aesthetic paradigm. Second, all combine with verve highly aesthetic and documentary-inflected viewpoints so that to create panoramic photographs, which transform urban or natural landscape into paradoxical sites of quietness, unsettledness, alienation, and sublimity at the same time. Third, none of them dictate an easy answer to such destructions; instead they aim to leave the spectator free of deciding whether there is any ethical implication.

Yibin I (Bathers), Sichuan Province
© Nadav Kander
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

Rather than affirm their gaze as condemnations of Chinese harsh disruption of either natural or urban landscapes, they have chosen a more insightful path in problematising their photographs’ capacities of showing diverse intuitive and emotional responses to another culture environment, which eventually appear relevant in both Chinese and global contexts. Ultimately I also believe Burtynsky, Kander and Teh shed light on the existing links between China and the West.

For more visual stories about China, please visit Marine Cabos Photography of China.

Urban Renewal #6, Apartment Complex, Jiangjun ao, Hong Kong, 2004
© Edward Burtynsky
Please visit China’s landscape through the lens of three Western photographers for the full size image.

Text and photos by Steven Nestor.

In the summer of 1996 I was lying in a Parisian park listening to an article being read aloud on the events surrounding the disaster that had befallen climbers on Everest the previous May. Although I’d never been overly fascinated with mountains or mountain life, the story left quite an impression on me. Despite the most modern of communications, equipment and planning, nature had intervened at a time of her choosing to take eight climbers. Further increasing my new found interest in mountains, and in particular the cold, I later read Jon Krakauer’s (controversial) Into Thin Air. There followed readings of other stories like Touching the Void or the epic tale of Toni Kurz’s last climb. In my mind’s eye I began to better envisage our insignificance and fragility when pitted against a collusion of mountains and nature aiming to eradicate our daring incursions.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

I’m not sure whether it’s because of these extreme stories, but whenever I was skiing I preferred overcast or snowy days that hinted at something greater beyond the order of colour-coded slopes under a serene blue sky. Despite a hyper rationalized world, there must still be some residual memory of eons ago when life was dictated to by unkind winters, dragons and God. Although today you can get back into your house or car, the elements pushing against you are the same that wore Ötzi down once-upon-a-time ago. And the snow in the picturesque skiing village that you brush against on a sub-zero night when your breath is turned to crystals is the same that numbs the life out of the lost climber. It’s the same that stopped Napoleon and Hitler.

© Steven Nestor
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Lying on the valley floor at 1,800m the small French alpine town of Bonneval-sur-Arc is effectively the end of the road as the next hamlet is cut off and abandoned over the winter months. In late December of 2011 I was back for a week’s stay. For much of the time we were there heavy snowfalls and wind dominated, closing slopes and leaving us unsure as to whether we would be able to leave the valley on time. The locals said it was some of the worst weather they had experienced in 20 years. In Europe’s east dozens succumbed as a deep arctic chill expanded westward.

© Steven Nestor
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In a time with claims that the earth is warming at such a pace that entire mountain ranges will be snow free within our lifetime, I for one found being enveloped in a snowstorm to be comforting. Somehow all seemed well again in this incomprehensible and perpetually lost world. The winter before, Ireland and Britain had been gripped by uncharacteristically cold weather and, care of the “end is nigh” media, I had heard for the first time talk about the Maunder Minimum of prolonged freezing winters in Europe. Most notable was the so-called Great Frost of 1683–84 when the river Thames froze for weeks with ice recorded as being nearly 30cm thick. Now with the unexpected presence of an unusually and unexpectedly cold winter some experts were speculating as to the possibilities of its return.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

In the midst of a harsh alpine winter, I had time to reflect on representations of winter in art and in particular, two painters. There was the acute memory of Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, so much easier to recall in the white cold than googling it online or standing before it in a climate-controlled museum. I was beginning to understand this painting as a “report” or message beyond a superficial admiration of the painter’s technique: this is winter, this is what it does to our world.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

The other painter to occupy my thoughts was the far lesser known – though equally impressive – Tino Aime with his depictions of northern Piedmont in deep overcast winters in a waning light and void of colour, except for the odd bright berry. While he has painted in modern times his work perfectly illustrates that still emptiness of the outwardly lifeless mountain village in the dead of winter. Nowadays, however, many of those villages have been abandoned and, steadily roofless, blend into the mountains’ rocks, forests and snow. Life had been too tough. Others are only for the fair weather visitors or have been transformed for the skiing season.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Returning to Bonneval-sur-Arc for a second time meant being surer of what photographic treatment and approach the valley could be given. I didn’t want to try to work on or extract what little colour was in evidence or focus on the postcard village. Rather, I wanted to shoot on black and white transparency to best record the subtleties of tone in what is largely a monochromatic landscape mostly devoid of human presence. I was determined to immerse myself for as extended a time as was possible in this alien landscape, from the morning to after sundown when few, if anyone, was still out beyond the village, and surely no one else with a camera.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Even though modern transportation and infrastructure desensitizes the traveller, time spend in the Alps in winter cannot fail to impress. Beyond the roads, paths and slopes lies an inhospitable and impassable beauty evident to even the most uninterested traveller. Snow changes everything. Walking is laboured and subtler features obscured. Sounds are muffled and the flat light wipes away all texture, compressing surfaces to the flatness of a clean page. I pass the Risques d’avalanches sign on a snowshoe track no wider than my shoulders. Leave it and you’re knee or thigh deep in snow. There may be no more dragons or desire for a god in many, but I strangely feel that I somehow shouldn’t be there recreationally. It’s unnatural and what is understood as beauty by me and the multitudes of other urbanites has been termed ‘White Death’ by others. Hannibal’s sure dreams of taking Rome vanished along with 18,000 of his men in these mountains. I should never have been able to reach this valley with such ease. At most I ought to be cloistered in one of Aime’s dormant villages longing for the spring and the opening of meadows and passes. I’m riding some freak spike in world history that allows people go wherever they choose. I’m on the top of Babel. And I have equally become aware of nature’s ambivalence towards the sole walker. ‘And Petit-Jean said to me — “You see that [snow]? Do you see it? Well, it doesn’t see you!”’

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Of course I cannot claim that I took these photographs solely because of painters and talk of cold cycles. But, in this altered environment I felt I could come closer to the vision transmitted by these artists and the possibility of a new Great Frost. It was in this frame of mind that I sought to engage with the same essential physical elements presented to and by the likes of Bruegel and Aime, and to capture the malign muteness and vastness of a pronounced winter in the mountains in an epoch of severance from that which thwarted our ancestors.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

When walking alone in the snow towards the valley’s end it becomes clearer how the immediacy of all things Internet and a fully mapped world can lead us in our predominantly urban lives to forget what our scale once meant and the utter indifference of nature. Once upon a time the snows isolated communities for months on end. Ötzi was held for three millennia before being given up, but now it’s only a three hour drive from Turin, or 45mm away on a 1:1 200 000 map. And I can’t pretend that I’m blind to the diverting beauty of this place, or that I don’t enjoy it on the same level as those I’m with.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Then I remembered the booms during the snowstorm at night. High up the mountains they were detonating bombs to curb the risk of avalanche. So even at the most inaccessible heights we can exercise control remotely. I’m forced to reconsider my work and my dwelling on the old significance of winter in the mountains. It’s January 1st 2012 and I’ve photographed the descente aux flambeaux. They’re serving free hot chocolate and vin brulé. Editing my work I reassess the merits of an earlier colour image from the valley: the framing reminiscent of Aime’s landscapes. It’s pretty. I like it. And although I had been very pleased with the black and white approach, now I’m not so sure there’s much truth in my images beyond a pure analogue recording. They’re half the story, if. They’re what I wanted and got – few surprises – but I am increasingly aware that my careful, deliberate framing has conjured up a false reading of this place. Despite Godard’s seemingly infallible declaration in Le Petit Soldat that “la photographie c’est la vérité. Et le cinéma c’est vingt-quatre fois la vérité par seconde” – photography is the truth and cinema, 24 times the truth per second – as a practitioner it’s so obviously not. In my view finding in Bonneval-sur-Arc I conjured up a deceit. The snow and mountains are still the same that took the lost wanderer, but that’s all but irrelevant today.

© Steven Nestor
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

And now it’s late December 2012 and I’m in Gressoney-La-Trinité: one day’s skiing in the falling snow. I can’t see a thing because my visor and glasses keep fogging. I don’t like skiing anymore, and the mountains in winter a little less. The next day the slopes are mercifully closed due to high winds.

Snow tyres and chains. In 30 minutes or so we’ll be clear of all the pretty suggestive snow and onto the dry drab plane below. Home in an hour and a half.

We always complain about the motorway tolls.

It is the end of winter.

For more stories and photos, please visit Steven Nestor website.

© Tino Aime
Please visit Bonneval-sur-Arc and the End of Winter, by Steven Nestor for the full size image.

Text and photos by Eamonn Farrell.

My first real interest in photography as opposed to taking photos of my children, came about as a result of the coverage of the Vietnam War by the likes of Don McCullin, Larry Burrows and Eddie Adams etc. In the first instance it was both admiration and disbelieve that men and women could put themselves at such risk to life and limb in pursuance of an image.

Energising. Iveta T in County Waterford.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

And secondly, the shocking power of the images of death, destruction, fear, bravery, cowardice and cruelty, that they managed to capture in situations where putting your head up to take a photo, was akin to suicide. The impact of those images and their effect in changing public opinion about the war, convinced me that the still image could be a powerful force in changing the world. And in Ireland a lot of change was required particularly in relation to the position of women in society.

Harvest. Ulorin Vex in County Offaly.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

I went on to become a freelance photojournalist in Dublin, setting up a small agency with my brother Brian, also a photographer and eventually both of us became picture editors of separate Sunday newspapers. A few years later I left to set up a new agency photocall Ireland concentrating on coverage of politics, business and the arts. During this time the realities of trying to make a living from professional photography and providing for your family left no time to pursue your own personal photographic interests.

Shelter. Ulorin Vex in County Donegal.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

Like other developed countries, control of photographic images by the spin doctors of politics and business, had moved onto the same level as the music and celebrity industry. The opportunity to capture meaningful and insightful images was fast disappearing. Control of the media by the creative filtering of what was made available to it, was the modus operandi of a new and growing profession – the PR Guru. The enjoyment and excitement of working in the news media was fast disappearing for me. Thankfully I was now reaching a stage in my life where there were less demands on me financially and I could at last take time out to work on personal projects which were not dependent on a financial return.

Wonderland. Roswell Ivory in County Wicklow.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

In 2009 I started a project, which has the working title, The Nude in the Irish Landscape. I am using the female form to represent the human species and how we relate to our natural and man made environment. By placing the naked model outdoors in the landscape I am drawing attention to how vulnerable we are as a species, when stripped of our clothing, mobile phones and iPads. Alone and naked we have to deal with the powerfull forces of nature, increasingly transmuted as a result of our greed and power hungry rape and abuse of the beautiful planet on which we live. I am trying to get across the simple message – without a healthy planet earth we will die. But without us it would happily live on, perhaps forever.

Birth. Ulorin Vex in County Donegal.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

Great idea, maybe! But where was I to get models who were prepared to pose naked outdoors in cold, wet and windy Ireland? Most photographers know women – girlfriends, wives or partners – who are prepared to pose for them indoors. Outdoors is another matter entirely. Yes there are art nude models in Ireland. But very few at the level required to shoot in up to five locations a day. Confident enough not to be distracted when interrupted by humans or animals (hill-walkers, farmers, dogs, cows, donkeys etc). Capable of gritting their teeth (but not showing it), when working in wind and rain. And happy to put up with cuts, bruises, scrapes and bites.

Natural Resource. Monika T in County Wicklow.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

With a few notable exceptions I had to go abroad and use models from England, Europe and America. And make heavy use of alternative model sites such as Model Mayhem. In the process I met some wonderful women, dedicated to their art and prepared to push their bodies to the limit to produce an image worthy of their input.

Lands End. Raphaella McNamara in County Kerry.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

I was very lucky that the first two models I worked with were at the very top of their profession and set the standard for others to follow. I shot Ulorin Vex over three days in County Donegal when we were blessed with the usual Irish summer weather: four seasons in one hour! At least it gave us a bit of everything to work with. Ulorin is not only a top class model with the ability to change her look at will, but she is also brave to the point of endangerment.

Never Never Land. Ella Rose in a Ghost Estate in County Leitrim.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

I worked with Ivory Flame in November of 2009 for two days. It was wet, windy and freezing cold. There was no four seasons in one hour. Just two days of hard winter weather. Her beautiful white skin was turning blue. I thought her nose was going to fall off. But she continued to pose in the most difficult conditions, producing great images.

Dispossessed. Ella Rose in Dublin City.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

When it was all over she told me she would never work in Ireland outdoors again. Two years later I convinced her to come back during the summer, telling her that we would get blue skies on the Aran Islands. I lied and it rained and rained. Ireland is a wet and windy land. Will she ever come back again. I don’t know, but feel free to ask her.

Bog Cotton Rising. Juchi in County Offaly.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

There were of course issues, some technical, some aesthetic. You spend days searching for suitable locations and find one that works with great mood and skies etc. You book the model and she arrives (usually for two days at a time), drive to the location and there is no sky, just a dull grey flat ceiling. What do you do? Likewise, when after hours of shooting, the model has hit the perfect pose, but at the same moment a cloud has cast a dark shadow over a critical aspect of the landscape. The model pleads for the shot showing her perfect pose, but you know you have to go with the less perfect one which shows the landscape to better effect. In the end it was always a compromise, understanding that it was never less than a union between model, landscape and photographer.

Awakening. Ivory Flame in County Kildare.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

As time passed and I entered year three of the project I became more conscious of the fact that I should incorporate some sense of the economic and social devastation wrought on the people of Ireland by the reckless and greedy behaviour of a cabal of bankers, developers and politicians. This entailed the use of models in built up urban areas, which presented more difficult problems than those encountered in a rural landscape. When you add into the mix the conservative view which many in Ireland still have regarding the exposure of the naked body, it put extra demands on the professionalism of the art nude models with whom I worked.

Wasted. Mika Meiri in County Mayo.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

Finally there is the issue of the genre of art nude within the framework of art photography in Ireland. There are several fine art nude photographers here. To a large extent we work on the fringes of the art world. Silent, unobtrusive, unseen. This despite the exalted position of such photographers as Man Ray, Helmut Newton, Edward Weston, Andre Kertesz, Manuel Alveraz Bravo and Lucien Clergue on the international stage. The time has come for art nude photographers in Ireland to emerge from the woodwork and for curators to be brave enough to embrace the challenge of breaking a taboo.

For more informations and photos of nudes in the Irish landscape, please visit Eamonn Farrell website.

Survival. Monika T in County Wicklow.
© Eamonn Farrell
Please visit The Nude in the Irish Landscape, by Eamonn Farrell for the full size image.

Text and photos by David Parker.

Some years ago I rescued an anonymous 19th century albumen print from a London shop window. Its only protection from the sun was a thin plastic sleeve on which a price tag of £12 had been stuck. Sadly, the print showed that the Sun had started its implacable work by leaving a very faint shadow of the sticker on the already pale sky but I bought it anyway because I liked the image.

In the way that pictures from this time often reveal a mysterious lost world, I found it powerfully alluring. Seductively coloured in those warm sepia-like tones on a paper yellowed with age, typical of prints from this era, the image depicts a harbour scene somewhere in the tropics. Beyond the thick stand of palm trees, single funnelled merchant freighters in the mid-distance are offloading cargo into barges via tubular chutes. A solitary white 4-masted clipper breaks the skyline at a point approximating the Golden Mean of the image. For me the whole scene instantly evokes the humid atmosphere of a novel by Josef Conrad.

Anonymous 19th century albumen print
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

The location of this image is a mystery to me. Over the years this has become one of its attractions and I’ve never had a wish to discover its identity. I can therefore enter the scene with my own narratives and sense of wonder intact. In ‘Middlemarch’ George Eliot writes:

“He said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting-grounds for the poetic imagination”

I tell this story by way of indicating my response to the question most often asked of my own pictures, “Where is it?” At first I was uncomfortable about refusing to disclose locations. After all, it’s a natural enough question. But over time I’ve been encouraged by the acceptance people have about this anonymity. Perhaps they think as I do that in a world that has now been saturation-mapped there is still a need to discover fresh vistas and to know there are still places ready to offer us enchantment and glimpses of eternity.

So if you know or suspect the location of the anonymous picture, please, please resist the urge to send me a ‘helpful’ email, I’d rather not have my mind put to rest over its identity!

Landscape VII, 1998
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

For me, 19th century photography offers a kind of magic carpet ride into a world of mystery and lost histories. Back then the new medium was very largely a rich man’s hobby but was also seized upon by scientists, geographers and artists. We know very little about the aesthetic intent of many of these individuals; the divisions between document, reportage and expression were not then as clearly defined (and remixed) as they are now, and therefore there is an inherent ambiguity in our interpretation of their images. What is clear however is that in this embryonic medium, dominated by painterly conventions, a few practitioners such as Cameron, Teynard and Greene, often working in isolation, developed recognisably photographic sensibilities; that is, an awareness of the camera’s unique way of seeing the world; the aesthetic of the image claiming primacy over its content.

At this distance in time it is a little hard for us to grasp the impact of the pictures made by Carleton Watkins in Yosemite in the 1860’s. They so entranced people of the time that it was quickly designated a National Park, and ironically also inspiring Albert Bierstadt’s massive paintings that initiated the period of the ‘Western Sublime’, which in turn inspired the mid 20th century American f.64 school headed by Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and others.

More than a century on from the work of these early great photographers, the seminal ‘New Topographics’ exhibition in 1975 reflected our continued concern with depicting the landscape, and carried with it an implicit disavowal of the ‘pictorialism’ and ‘monumentalism’ of the early 20th century photographers. After this exhibition making landscapes in the manner of the ‘Southwest School’ became as relevant as writing symphonies in the late-romantic style. It therefore seemed to me problematic to return to the sylvan landscape without taking on board the work of Robert Adams, Stephen Shore and others, with their very human take on the subject, but I felt that it was a job worth attempting. I was not working in isolation: Mark Klett and Thomas Joshua Cooper were also clearly taking their markers from the early masters, and both had in mind long spans of cultural and geological history. My own agenda was to find a way to re-explore with a modern sensibility the ‘monumental landscape’ of the 19th century by seeing it in terms that were symbolic and metaphoric rather than theatrical and rhetorical, by fashioning an austere beauty and using techniques unavailable to the early pioneers. Moreover, I wanted to occasionally integrate the human element into my pictures in a way which not merely gave a sense of scale but also affirmed our fleeting presence within the landscape, in other words, using the landscape to put ourselves into some sort of perspective by leaving traces of our passing through it.

Landscape VIII, 1998
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

The remit of contemporary photography, to ‘witness the times’, is one that increasingly I feel rather detached from. Social criticism in the arts, didactic art in other words, is very limited in what it can say about geologic timescales, and I share with many people a need to experience art which can take me beyond the temporal and quotidian. Before going any further I need to renounce any personal claims to aesthetic purity, since my first project Broken Images, about the Nazca Lines in Peru, was concerned with the collision of the temporal and eternal, and was photographed in full colour in a reportage style.

Solitario, Juntos (Alone, Together), 1988
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

In contrast to this earlier work, key to my landscape projects was a deliberate striving after beauty, and here I need to digress slightly. For many years I have been greatly affected by the power of beauty in art to arrest the mind and attune it to another level of consciousness. Even a secular soul like me is irresistibly enchanted by the nave in a medieval cathedral, the choral harmonies in a Bach oratorio or the deceptively simple abstractions of a Paul Klee painting. Beauty has been described recently by the English sculptor Grayson Perry as ‘the elephant in the room that many artists find difficult to ignore’. Beauty requires no commentary for its appreciation and no validation by a priesthood of academics, though this can sometimes deepen the experience of it for someone already engaged with an artwork. T S Eliot observed that ‘All great art communicates long before it is understood’. And I think that the rhythm of beauty is the vehicle that engages us in what James Joyce calls ‘aesthetic arrest’, that moment of revelation which makes us one with the work.

Beauty has always been contested territory and doubtless will continue to be so. Many artists remain deeply suspicious of beauty and ignore it altogether, and for fear of being misunderstood are eager to have the subtext of their ‘difficult’ work explicated rather than risk it being judged only at face value. Of course beauty is subjective and comes in many forms, for example, an experience of the Sublime is often described as a ‘terrible beauty’. Beauty, as against mere chocolate box prettiness, is capable of carrying deep reservoirs of thought, consolation and redemptive power, and reminds us in a poetical way of our shared myths and history. So, far from beauty being in some way regressive, conservative and irrelevant, it remains alive for me as a ideal to aim for without reservation.

Siren XXXVIII, 2001
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

‘The way forward is the way back’ wrote Eliot, and for me at least this meant finding a form to utilise the visual vocabulary of photography’s forefathers, one that was steeped in beauty. Revisiting the 19th century landscape with its aesthetic of narrow but rich tonalities, offered me a potential way to excite feelings of wonder and awe, curious emotions which at once fill us with enchantment and a sense of our mortality. Feeding into my enthusiasm for the work of these pioneers was an interest in myth, legend and classical literature, the human rather than the political face of culture, and from this mix I fancied that I began to see striking features of the landscape in ways that our ancestors might also have seen them, first as beacons and landmarks, then perhaps in anthropomorphic terms and even as ritual totems, all hinting at a relationship to the landscape that was both utilitarian and, dangerous word, spiritual.

Natural arches, for example, become bridges between worlds, thresholds of transition. Solitary sea-stacks become sirens awaiting the unwary seafarer. Caves become entrances into the labyrinth or the abodes of oracles. The Earth’s geology was and is therefore a mythogenic zone which the human psyche is able to embrace in ways that are metaphoric and symbolic. Philosophically, these are of course large subjects and well beyond the scope of a single artform such as photography to convey, my personal aesthetic remit is to still the mind of the spectator into simple fascination of the world.

Siren III, 2003
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

I knew from the outset that I wanted to use a proper panoramic camera for this work, one that covers a wider angle than human vision, not only because of the way that its deep perspective emphasises foreground subject matter, but to metaphorically expand our view of the world. For a few years I’d been experimenting with several panoramic cameras but was unhappy with the letterbox shape they all produced, which I felt gave undue prominence to the format over the image content. Finally I discovered that the Swiss company Seitz produced a made-to-order 360-degree panoramic camera that used 5” military reconnaissance film. Designed originally for interiors and group pictures, the Seitz produced an image more than twice the height of other cameras. Fewer than 10 of these cameras were ever made, but for the brief period between their production and the shift of the military away from film towards digital, they produced images of a quality that couldn’t be achieved any other way. However, full 360-degree images look almost always ‘tricksy’ because of the inevitable distortions, but I discovered that limiting the range to less than 180-degrees of the natural scene made these distortions almost unnoticeable. And with a vertical angle of 80-degrees I was able to produce images with much more regular proportions: approximately 2:1.

New Desert Myths VII, 2006
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

I still had to find a way to produce the large prints I envisaged, 2 metres x 1metre, and since I also wanted to produce prints which had the colour palette of faded 19th century prints this presented further challenges. Colour photographic paper proved to be lacklustre and too narrow in tonal range, and eventually I settled on toning black and white paper. Managing fibre-based paper on this scale sent me literally back to the drawing board to design a machine capable of handling it. I had reached the point of submitting prototype drawings for tender when I was told about a French system designed for colour processing that might just work with b/w paper. It was a further 3 years of work with this system that enabled me finally to make prints that I was happy with.

The characteristic tonality of 19th century photographs invariably produced bright featureless skies and dark foliage. The reason for this is that all early black and white emulsions were only sensitive to blue light. Blue sky would therefore be strongly registered, green much less so and red and yellow almost not at all. Blue sensitive emulsions have not been available for many decades; however I was able to find a blue filter which corresponded to the spectral sensitivity of wet collodion glass plates and this has since been an essential feature of my work. Atmospheric haze, being at the blue end of the spectrum, is greatly amplified with this filter and produces a graduated series of fading planes disappearing off to the horizon, blending softly into the infinity of the sky and enhancing the sense of perspective and limitless space.

Another feature of the 19th century collodion process that impressed me was the fine grain image quality that could be achieved. This was just as well because photographic enlargers didn’t exist at this time, so large images had to be contact printed from large glass plates, necessitating equally large and cumbersome cameras. ‘Mammoth’ plates, measuring 22”x18” (56cm x 46cm) had to be coated on location in a small tent, a delicate and toxic procedure requiring great skill. The plate then had to be loaded into the camera and exposed before the collodion dried, and immediately rushed back to the tent for development. Taking advantage of their blue sensitivity, the plates could be coated and processed in the yellow light provided by a small coloured window in the tent. Setting up a tent could take as long as setting up the camera, so it is understandable that many photographers chose to leave the tent in the picture rather than move it.

A few years after I had managed to make my own prints, I had the good fortune to examine a copy of the 13-plate ‘Mammoth’ panorama that Edweard Muybridge made of San Francisco. Spread out, the view measures around 17 feet long (5.2 metres) and is full of breathtaking detail when viewed close up. It is clear that part of Muybridge’s aesthetic gaol was to immerse the spectator in a high-resolution spectacle. It must have mesmerised all those who first saw it and even a 100 years after its creation it still had the power to raise hairs on the back of my neck! This experience confirmed me in my belief that the delicate rendering of detail could almost be an end in itself: the way that something is photographed is at least as important at what is photographed. If an image has already engaged the viewer, such a wealth of detail has the power to delay the eye still further in fascination.

Landscape IX, 1997
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

Composing images with the Seitz requires a different approach to judging the forms within a scene because there are no viewfinders capable of properly rendering such wide angles without distortion. I therefore had to devise simple protractors that would reliably indicate the reach of the camera lens, forcing me to visualise the balance of the composition in my head. Not surprisingly, these methods had their limitations and I often had to return to a site several times before getting the image I was looking for, sometimes repositioning the camera only a few feet. Post manipulation in Photoshop was not an option because the images would ultimately have to be printed traditionally with a negative in an enlarger, and there wasn’t then or now, a way to generate a negative from a digital file with sufficient resolution to substitute for the original. Ultimately, I found that processing on location in my campervan was the best way to ensure compositional accuracy, ironically a nod back to the early pioneers developing glass-plate negatives in their tents, and also using printing-out-paper (POP) on location to finely judge the result. This involves sandwiching the negative between the sensitised POP and glass and exposing to full sunlight for a few minutes. The paper is then fixed and toned for permanence.

New Desert Myths I, 1999
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

It is always an exciting moment to see the first print because up till then, without a viewfinder, the image can only be visualised. With its panoptic reach the camera is revealing an image that the eye simply cannot encompass. The still photograph thus becomes the mediator between the real and the imagined.

An unusual feature of 360-degree cameras is that they scan the scene with a vertical slit whilst rotating and pulling the film across the shutter. With my particular menu of filmspeed, processing and filtration, the time taken to shoot 180-degrees is between 4 and 8 minutes. A serendipitous result of this slow rotation is that people sometimes unwittingly appear twice in the same picture. Limbs might be truncated or shadows liberated from figures. This unanticipated discovery enabled me for example, to place my disembodied hand on a rock surface in an echo of the hand prints left in caves by our earlier ancestors.

New Desert Myths I, 1999 (Detail)
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

About a year ago I switched to archival pigment printing because the process of printing and toning large pictures in the darkroom became unsustainable with the disappearance of suitable papers, environmental considerations forcing the elimination of the heavy metals needed to give these papers their unique depth and lustre. However, I’ve embraced this change with enthusiasm because in my view the gains have significantly outweighed the losses, though for some people traditional vs. digital will always remain a theological battleground. The history of photography is one of constant technical developments being the father of aesthetic innovation, and I’m as excited about the digital revolution as daguerreotypists must have been when wet-plate photography arrived. I am now enjoying the ability to produce prints with a fidelity to my original intentions that were often impossible in the darkroom. Anyone who has ever laboured for hours in a darkroom over a single print will understand this.

If you have stayed the course with me this far, thank you.

Please visit David Parker website for more informations and photographs.

Siren XV, 2005
© David Parker
Please visit Myth and Landscape, by David Parker for the full size image.

Text and photos by Michael Marten.

In 2003 I was searching for a photo project that would express how landscape is constantly changing, not through human activities but through natural processes like weather, erosion, changes of season. On my way back south from Edinburgh, I chanced upon this tiny harbour on the coast of Berwickshire, in south-east Scotland. It’s invisible from the nearest road, but there was a track down the cliffside and rocks below that looked enticing. When I got down, I found a hand-hewn 30-metre tunnel through the red sandstone rock and beyond it the harbour, all sand and pebbles at low tide. I spent the whole day there taking pictures with my 5×4 Wista.

Harbour, Berwickshire. 22 August 2005.
Low water 11am, high water 6pm
© Michael Marten
Please visit Sea Change, by Michael Marten for the full size image.

When I got home and had the films processed, I saw that I had taken more or less the same view of the curving teeth-like rocks outside the harbour at both low tide in the morning and at high tide in the late afternoon. The contrast between the pictures fascinated me – how the rising sea completely changed the perspective and feeling of the landscape. I immediately knew I’d found my project. So I set out to find places where there would be a dramatic visual difference between low and high tide and in the process became a student of tides!

The 'shore goats', Berwickshire. 19 September 2008.
Low water 11.45am, 4pm, high water 5.40pm
© Michael Marten
Please visit Sea Change, by Michael Marten for the full size image.

In 2004 I returned to the Berwickshire harbour. Built in the 1830s, for a time in the late 19th century it was the third largest herring fishing harbour on the east coast of Scotland. Now it hosts two tiny boats and visitors lucky enough to know of its existence or chance upon it.

Salmon fishery, Solway Firth. 27 and 28 March 2006.
Low water 5.20pm, high water 12 noon
© Michael Marten
Please visit Sea Change, by Michael Marten for the full size image.

On most coasts around the world there are two tides every day, but I quickly learned that not all tides are the same. They vary hugely from place to place. In the Mediterranean the height of the tide (from low to high) is measured in centimetres. In Britain it ranges from 1 metre on parts of the North Sea coast to 15 metres (third highest in the world) in the Bristol Channel. Also, the height in any one place varies over time. Every two weeks, in the four or five days starting at new moon and full moon, the tides are higher. They are called ‘spring’ tides in English – because they rise higher, not because they have anything to do with the season of spring. In between, when the moon is waxing or waning, the tides are less high and are known as ‘neap’ tides. So high tide in the Bristol Channel might be 15 metres high at a spring tide, but less than 10 metres at neap.

Cuckmere Haven, Sussex. 12 August 2006.
Low water 9.15am, high water 2.50pm
© Michael Marten
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That’s only one part of the rhythm of the tides. Spring and neap tides also vary throughout the year. Spring tides are highest in the months around the equinoxes, in February, March, April, and August, September, October. One of the two spring tides in each of these months is particularly high, and that’s when the Bristol Channel’s 15-metre figure is reached.

Bedruthan Steps, Cornwall. 25 and 31 August 2007.
High water 4.30pm, low water 2pm
© Michael Marten
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The water doesn’t just rise highest at the big spring tides, it also goes out furthest. That’s ideal for my photographs, since it is when there is the most dramatic visual difference between low tide and high tide. It’s when beaches get completely covered at flood and when rocks are most revealed at ebb.

Worms Head, Glamorgan. 25 June 2005.
High water 9.45am, low water 4pm
© Michael Marten
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The island of Britain isn’t big by international standards, but its coastline measures 17,800 km if you were to walk round all the headlands, bays, sea lochs and estuaries! I’ve been photographing British tides for 8 years, and I’ve still only covered a fraction of the whole coast.

North Berwick, East Lothian. 20 August 2005.
Low water 11.15am, high water 3.40pm
© Michael Marten
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So when people ask if I’m going to photograph the tides at Mont Saint-Michel or in the Bay of Fundy on the north-east coast of America, which boasts the highest tidal range in the world (16 metres), I reply that I’ve got more than enough to be going on with here at home! The British coast isn’t just long, it’s extraordinarily varied. There are long sandy beaches, white chalk cliffs, industrial estuaries, harbours large and small, tidal saltmarshes, and great sweeps of flat sand and mud like Morecambe Bay where the flood tide comes racing in faster than a galloping horse and the unwary have often been caught and drowned, including 21 Chinese cockle pickers in 2004.

Perranporth, Cornwall. 29 and 30 August 2007.
Low water 12 noon, high water 8pm
© Michael Marten
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Since I became interested in tides, I spend hours studying the tide tables produced by the UK Hydrographic Office (UKHO). It’s not just a question of knowing on what days the spring tides will occur in a particular year, I also need to find out the times of low and high water in each place I want to photograph. Today, for instance, high tides are at 5.45am and 6.35pm in Southampton, 8.40am and 9.18pm at London Bridge, and 10.50am and 11.45pm at Newcastle. Tomorrow all these times will advance between 20 minutes and 45 minutes, and the same the next day and the day after.

Southend-on-Sea, Essex. 10 September 2010.
Low water 7.45am, high water 2pm
© Michael Marten
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The UKHO is a branch of Britain’s ministry of defence. The tide tables they produce are published as thick books detailing times of high water and low water, tide heights, and other parameters throughout the year for all the harbours around the British Isles – and there are a lot of harbours.

Blackpool, Lancashire. 16 August 2010.
Low water 11.20am, high water 4pm
© Michael Marten
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The more I photographed the tides, the more fascinated I became by their complex variations. So I got in touch with the UKHO to see if I could talk to someone who might be able to answer some of my questions. Like, why is one of the two high tides each day always a bit higher than the other one (‘diurnal variation’)? And is it true that the tides don’t just slop back and forth from one side of a sea or ocean to the other, but are in fact a kind of circular wave that rotates every 12 hours around a ‘point of no tide’ called the amphidromic point? The UKHO, it turned out, employs a Head of Tides and a Deputy Head of Tides and these two scientists very kindly spent a couple of hours one afternoon answering my questions.

Cockenzie, East Lothian. 23 August 2005.
Low water 10.40am, high water 7.30pm
© Michael Marten
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The tides, I was taught in school, are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon on the waters of the earth. In fact the moon contributes two thirds of the effect and the sun one third. When moon and sun are more or less in line with earth – as happens around full moon and new moon – their pull is combined and causes spring tides. When moon, sun and earth are out of alignment, the pull of the bodies tends to cancel out and we get neap tides. It is the interplay of the moon’s pull as it orbits earth, and the sun’s pull as it is orbited by earth and moon, that makes the rhythms of the tides so complex.

Holehaven Creek, Thames estuary, Essex. 10 and 11 September 2010.
High water 4.20pm, low water 10.15am
© Michael Marten
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The time between high and low tide averages 6 hours 20 minutes, but this is just an average. In some places the tide may take 8 or 9 hours to come in, but only 3 or 4 hours to go out again; or vice versa; or anywhere in between. And even where the timing of the tides is close to the average, it will change from day to day: so today it may take 6 hours 17 minutes for the tide to rise in the pretty harbour of St Ives, in Cornwall, tomorrow 6 hours 30 minutes, and the day after 6 hours 8 minutes.

Wivenhoe, Essex. 23 March 2007.
Low water 9.30am, high water 4.15pm
© Michael Marten
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The answer to the question about whether tides are rotating waves is: yes, they are. In the North Sea, for example, there are three separate systems, or tidal gyres, that circulate anti-clockwise. Each one rotates around its own point of no tide. You can visualise the tide as a flat plate like a computer disc or a vinyl record that is slightly tilted. The side of the plate that sticks up represents high tide, the opposite side is low tide. As the plate revolves, high and low tide sweep round. In the southern part of the North Sea, for instance, the wave of high tide sweeps down the east coast of England, then crosses over to travel along the coasts of Holland and north-west Germany before sweeping up the west coast of Denmark and then crossing back over to England. When the tide is high on the English coast it is low in Denmark, and vice versa.

Mussel storage pond, Brancaster Staithe, Norfolk. 10 March 2005.
Low water 1pm, high water 5.30pm
© Michael Marten
Please visit Sea Change, by Michael Marten for the full size image.

So tides are really circulating tidal waves, a kind of cyclical, twice-a-day tsunami to which all forms of tidal life have adapted, from algae and mussels to surfers and yachtsmen. When a real tsunami approaches a coast, the waters first recede from the shore and then return in the tidal wave. This is a high-speed version of the ebbing of the waters at low tide which then flood back at high tide.

Watchet, Somerset. 7 and 8 March 2007.
Low water 3.45pm, high water 9.30am
© Michael Marten
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I’ve been told that some of my tidal diptychs have a serene, timeless quality, and people therefore wonder if making the pictures is also a serene business of setting up the camera, taking the first picture at low (or high) water, and then gazing happily out to sea for 6 hours until the tide comes in (or goes out). In reality the project has rarely been that relaxed. On the contrary!

St Michael's Mount, Cornwall. 25 and 26 June 2009.
Low water 1.15pm, high water 8am
© Michael Marten
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I usually go to a section of coast – north-west Wales, for example, or the Thames estuary – for the five days of a high spring tide. I try to leave a couple of days early so that I can explore the whole area and scout out locations. This needs to be done when the tide is out, so that one can see what will be covered and revealed as the sea comes and goes. I select a number of possible views up and down a stretch of coastline, sometimes as much as 75 kilometres apart. Even in one location I often have two or three different viewpoints. High water is always a very busy time. Visually, the tide is at full for about one hour. In that time I try to shoot several views and maybe two or three locations, rushing on foot or by car from one to the other. Low tide tends to be a little more relaxed, as the water appears to be far out for three or even four hours.

Crosby, Liverpool. 5 and 7 April 2008.
High water 12 noon, low water 9am
© Michael Marten
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When I take the first picture of a tidal pair, I mark the position of my tripod with sticks or stones or scratch marks on rocks so that I can set up in the same position 6 hours later, or the next day. I also place a sheet of tracing paper, cut to 5×4, on the camera’s ground glass screen and trace with a pencil the key lines that will remain unchanged when the tide comes in or goes out – a rock, maybe, or harbour wall or distant headland, and of course the horizon. This allows me to frame the second image of the diptych exactly the same as the first. Since I started also using a digital camera (Phase One), I use a grid focusing screen and make detailed notes of where key features in the scene relate to particular lines of the grid.

Porthcawl, Glamorgan. 17 May 2007.
Low water 12 noon, high water 8pm
© Michael Marten
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Studying the tides makes clear that in spite of all the power of humans to shape, manipulate and harm the planet, its deep rhythms remain beyond our influence. In its geological and many of its other natural processes, the earth is stronger, subtler, more persistent than we sometimes imagine. Nonetheless, many of the views in my pictures probably will have ceased to exist in 100 or 200 years’ time, when global warming has caused sea levels to rise by several metres. For life in coastal towns and cities around the world, the change will be devastating. But from the planet’s perspective it will be just a minor episode. Sea levels have varied by more than 100 metres during the ice ages – a deeper, slower, climate-driven kind of tide that rises and falls over tens and hundreds of thousands of years instead of twice a day!

Visit Michael Marten for more sea tide photos.

Wells-next-the-Sea, Norfolk. 10 September 2006.
High water 8.40am, low water 3pm
© Michael Marten
Please visit Sea Change, by Michael Marten for the full size image.

Interview by Rona Chang and Yuhui Liao-Fan.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: What does “Photography” mean to you?

Rona Chang: Photography for me personally is the medium I use to understand and interpret how I see the world. It’s a comment on or reflection of what I find intriguing, interesting, and or inspiring.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - The Collector, Puno, Peru. 2009
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: Can you write a biographical introduction? When and where were you born?

Rona Chang: I was born in 1978 in Chungli, Taiwan. The town is famous for its beef noodles. It’s the first thing I eat when I get off the plane when I go back to Taiwan. My parents divorced and my mother, sister, and me moved to the States (Buffalo, NY) in 1985 when I was seven. We subsequently moved to Queens, New York when I was eight.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Fireworks, Kuanyin, Taiwan. 2008
© Rona Chang
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Queens is the most diverse place in the world with most of the world’s cultures represented right here in my current neighborhood of Jackson Heights. I don’t have a particular relationship with the Chinese immigrant community. I have always loved the diversity of New York City and think that I appreciate this mix of cultures most. I grew up with kids with varying backgrounds and related to the fact that we were all just kids. I embrace all of it, especially the amazing food that is available here. It’s a food lover’s delight around these parts.

My mother’s half of my family is from Wuhan, China. My maternal grandparents escaped the communists in 1949 and moved to Taiwan. My mother was the fourth child but the first of her siblings to be born in Taiwan. Her eldest sister was left behind in China and she still lives in there in Wuhan. My father’s family is Hakka and they have been living in Taiwan for about 400 years now. I have roots in both places and most of my immediate family is in Taiwan. I consider both Chungli and Queens to be home. While many consider me to be quite Americanized, I am deeply rooted in Taiwan and the States.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Oil Spill, San Francisco, CA, USA. 2007
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: What is your history as a photographer? What is your educational background? Where do you work?

Rona Chang: I was always interested in art as a child and that led to me attending a specialized High School in Manhattan called LaGuardia H.S. where I majored in art. I took a photography course there and fell in love with the medium. I went on to go to art school down-town at the Cooper Union for the Advancement for Science and Art. At Cooper, I took printmaking classes and a wonderful typography class but for the most part, I stuck like glue to my love of photography. I took all the photo classes I could get into.

For my day job I photograph art by digitizing and archiving flat art for museums, historical societies and other cultural institutions. For almost nine years, I worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have photographed all of the Japanese woodblock prints, Indian paintings, and Chinese hand-scrolls in the collection.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Choclo Vendor, Puno, Peru. 2009
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: Can you say a few words about your technique?

Rona Chang: When I photograph, I’m very aware of my composition, color, and content. I shoot film with a Mamiya 7 and scan it on an Imacon. I’m a minimalist when it comes to Photoshop. I basically clean dust off the scan and then adjust the color to best represent what I remember the scene to look like.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Holding Their Breaths, Hierve el Agua, Mexico. 2010
© Rona Chang
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Yuhui Liao-Fan: What is the importance of travel in your work and life? As I was talking with a couple of friend with diverging opinions about travel and photography, one said that only traveling photographers can feel the essence of things, because they have a fresh and impartial approach to places compared to the biased visions of locals. The other one said quite the opposite, photographers should explore their immediate surroundings because when they are in unfamiliar places they are unable to completely “understand” it. I think both approach are valid but what is your point of view about this question?

Rona Chang: Travel has always played an important role in my life. Growing up in Queens allowed me to be comfortable hearing multiple dialogues spoken. The offerings of ethnic food filled my curiosity about cultures. Having friends whose families, like mine, hailed from halfway around the world was the norm. It was natural for me to travel and explore the world where my neighbors are from.

I have traveled to many of these places to photograph and to gain an understanding of the cultures I am fascinated by. Moving Forward, Standing Still began inadvertently on my first trip to China in 2000, on a street in Shanghai. While I intend to continue to pursue the project, I am now beginning to focus on specific locations. The Queens edition of the project is about going full circle: seeing the world, re-examining my immediate home environment and then seeing the world within the neighborhoods of Queens.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Fixing the Colosseum, Macau, China. 2008
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: I think you are particularly interested in space. Can you describe and explain this fascination?

Rona Chang: I have a tendency to try to rearrange things within a space multiple times to see what feels best. As a child, I often rearranged furniture when my mom was at work and I would surprise her upon her return. Photography holds much of the same fascination for me. I look at all the elements and walk around to see which perspective makes the best composition or find a point of view that I find interesting and wait for the characters to move into position.

The Hold Over Water - Clouds Lifting, Shihmen Dam, Dasi, Taiwan. 2002
© Rona Chang
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Yuhui Liao-Fan: Simplifying it a bit, one can say that plain landscape photographers take pictures of breathtaking places, above all for their intrinsic beauty. In your case you try to portrait society through landscapes. Can you tell more about this interesting point? How can a photographer use landscape to represent contemporary society?

Rona Chang: For many years I only made landscapes (without any figures) though I was always drawn to make more interesting images than just beautiful pictures. The Hold Over Water, a series of images that explores my awe over water management sites are landscapes, though specific to a subject that is important to me. As I mentioned earlier, Moving Forward, Standing Still began inadvertently. I didn’t begin to think of the project as a series until I had a handful of images that felt like they belonged together and stood out from my previous work.

The Hold Over Water- Fog Lifting, Laudat, Dominica. 2003
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

I began to explore the concept of photographing society through people within the landscape. The characters within the frame tell a story. It can be a scene or a whole story about a way of life, a daily activity, or an interaction that may be local or universal. These images have allowed me to think of my connections and similarities to my characters and at the same time, how our lives are inherently different.

Some of these images may seem timeless or non site specific but they each tell an interesting story. For example, The Cobbler, was taken in Emhurst, Queens. His set-up, in front of the public library, is one that I’ve seen in many parts of the world. One would only guess that it was taken in the United States because his sign is in English and Chinese. He is a figure in the cultural landscape of Queens, a place that is decidedly at once local and global.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - The Cobbler, Elmhurst, NY, USA. 2010
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: Several of your photographs show people occupied in somehow odd occupations. Do you think that your pictures have a narrative approach or you are searching from something else?

Rona Chang: I don’t necessarily think of my images as having a narrative approach. I think of them as a way of sharing cultural revelations. I see a stage that is set, and the actors reveal a scene, but not always the movements of a whole story. There is something in it that you and I may be able to relate to and other parts that we may not, and that dynamic is what keeps me interested in searching for these compositions.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - River Bathing, Lensvik, Norway. 2010
© Rona Chang
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Yuhui Liao-Fan: Do you think is fundamental to live in a big and important city, or -for example thanks to Internet- the city in which you live is no longer a constraint?

Rona Chang: While I love New York, I don’t think that it is necessary to live here or any other big city to make good art. This is a topic that always comes up between my friend Alejandro Cartagena and me. He’s made a beautiful project, Suburbia Mexicana, based on his surroundings in northern Mexico. Alejandro is not limited by his environment, but instead uses it as his inspiration, or the incentive to make meaningful work.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Play, Lensvik, Norway. 2010
© Rona Chang
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Yuhui Liao-Fan: Do you think it’s important to have a website? Is it is essential to have it translated into various languages? How the Internet contributes to the spread contemporary photography?

Rona Chang: Websites are a wonderful way to share your work. It is not essential but a good way to present yourself to the public. For me, it’s a good editing tool and a way to keep things current. And I do think that websites should be in English or otherwise bilingual if possible. The Internet is a brilliant way to make things more accessible to a larger audience but there is still much to be said about going to see an exhibition in person. The recent Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand show at the Met is a handsome example.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Eid Candy, Jackson Heights, NY, USA. 2010
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: Do you have a wish or a photographic dream?

Rona Chang: My photographic ambitions mainly involve working on a project I believe in, carrying the thought through, and presenting it. On the other hand, my travel wish list is constantly growing.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Shoveling Snow, Elmhurst, NY, USA. 2010
© Rona Chang
Please visit Interview with Rona Chang for the full size image.

Yuhui Liao-Fan: Are you familiar with Chinese contemporary photography?

Rona Chang: I know very little about contemporary Chinese art and photography. Much of what I have seen seems romantic, though this is not an absolute comment. One Chinese photographer who I deeply admire is Sze Tsung Leong. He was born in Mexico and is British and American so he has an interesting cross-cultural background as well.

Please visit Rona Chang website for more great photos.

Moving Forward, Standing Still - Mian (noodles), Flushing, NY, USA. 2011
© Rona Chang
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Text and photographs by Gerco de Ruijter.

I began making aerial photographs in 1991. I did not shoot from a plane or a helicopter – I used a kite. I still engage a kite.

My camera hangs from the kite’s line and its lens is pointed down. I stand with two feet solidly on the ground and try to appraise the view from the camera as well as I can from my position.

There are easier ways of shooting photos.

I am fully empowered to choose a subject, to find the best location to take pictures of it by noticing from which direction the wind blows; I can select the time of the day, the season, the light; nevertheless my work will be much affected by chance.

This concept inspires me. I am not aiming at taking the ultimate photo. I love to be surprised by what is invisible to me, yet the camera easily registers. The so familiar landscape is turned upside down, that is what happens.

This approach to photography started at the time when I was an art student concentrating on drawing and painting. I used kite photography to give direction to my paintings, which were large and grainy. The viewer would define them as abstract even if they were rooted in realism.

My dilemma became: do I paint large landscapes as a gritty generalized structure, or do I paint photographic details, thus making the landscapes recognizable?

These two artistic approaches stand at right angles.

Meanwhile, I discovered a wealth of details on the negatives of a few photos shot at random, such as a swan in low flight over the polder; two horsemen following a dirt road; a farmer plowing his land.

Untitled 6”x6” 1993
© Gerco de Ruijter
Please visit Baumschule, by Gerco de Ruijter for the full size image.

Eventually, I decided to completely skip the transformation from photo to painting. I was discovering the power of kite photography: its detailed presentation of the larger, omnipresent composition; its close relationship with the visible truth; and the abstraction created by an uncommon viewpoint.

The early series were black and white images printed small scale, at first almost 5″x5″, later 6″x6″. The Dutch polder was their subject, and all of them showed something happening in the landscape. I exhibited these photos in a row, as a storyboard; the photos’ anecdotes connect them and create a loosely linked story line.

A narrative image draws the viewer’s attention to certain spots. Not all details will be noticed equally because the anecdote outshines the landscape’s structure. My approach of the landscape, from straight above, defines that all segments in the image are equally far from, or close to, the viewer. Foreground and background both don’t exist; each element is of the same importance. The squareness of the frame serves this neutral cutout and indicates a sort of scientific or carthographical research.

In the series I created after the black and white photos I concentrated on securing textures in “borderline” landscapes – in areas where urban culture and nature were meeting. The photos become more and more abstract; therefore it is difficult to recognize the subject’s scale or its origin. Sometimes there is a fence, a footprint, or a blooming dandelion to put everything in proportion. The viewer can switch between abstract composition and factual representation. This collaboration of composition and detailing naturally leads to larger print formats and a growing importance of the frame.

What do I want to show within this frame? Or, maybe more important, what don’t I want to make visible? I am striving to create images the viewer may look at twice or three times without understanding what precisely he is looking at. Leaving out concrete details produces a mysterious image.

Untitled 32”x32” 2003
© Gerco de Ruijter
Please visit Baumschule, by Gerco de Ruijter for the full size image.

How abstract can a landscape become while remaining a landscape? I tried to find the answer to this question during extended travels, by searching for a fully natural landscape, not manmade, and lacking any cultural presence. I found these “natural-born” sites in New Mexico – deserts formed by rocks and sand and all forms of erosion. A barren landscape, too, with scarce vegetation.

In White Sands I created a triptych in which I believe I reached the ultimate abstract landscape. With no “things” to see, and no vegetation to indicate any scale, what is visible is just the soft incline created by gypsum. Not the landscape is subject of the photo – daylight is.

White Sands Triptych each 20”x20” 2005
© Gerco de Ruijter
Please visit Baumschule, by Gerco de Ruijter for the full size image.

This natural desert landscape is in strong contrast with the Dutch culturally defined landscape. The Dutch landscape was efficiently drawn with functionality in mind on the drawing boards of urban and rural planners. Tulip fields, hothouses, land worked by farmers on tractors with their GPS handy. Not just one, no, uncountable “little things” form precisely lined rows.

Between 2001 and 2003, I took photos of poplars and willows in Vlaardingen’s Broekpolder. This polder was raised with silt taken from Rotterdam Harbor. The plan was to build homes. But after proof was delivered that the soil was contaminated with cadmium and mercury, no homes were constructed, and trees were planted.

Thus was created a splendid “green town”. The basic plan for the urbanization was executed after all, yet with lanes and paths for streets and trees planted in a clear grid instead of houses.

Untitled 32”x32” 2001
© Gerco de Ruijter
Please visit Baumschule, by Gerco de Ruijter for the full size image.

After 2008, I took photos of tree farms in Boskoop and Kesteren. A patchwork quilt of very different, neighboring agribusinesses separated only by a narrow road or a ditch. Here a bald, recently plowed field; there a piece of land full of holes dug for future trees.

I found an enormous variety of visual elements. They show up not just because of the different seasons, but also through the stratification of the land. Trees, soil, holes. The combination of a tight grid and the camera’s central perspective results in a distinct depth, while on a cloudy day foreground and background may slide into each other.

Baumschule #028 28”x28” 2008
© Gerco de Ruijter
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The landtract’s and the trees’ small scale (trees vary between 3′ and 12′ high) allowed me to adjust my technique. Instead of a kite I used a long fishing rod on some occasions. On top of this rod is a 2,5″ x 2,5″ camera with a wide-angle lense. A self-timer is adjusted to give me enough time to telescope the rod and manoeuver the camera above the subject. The frame of the image begins in front of my own shoes and measures roughly 30′ x 30′.

I am now finding I get more control of the ultimate image.

In the well-defined organization of the tree farm I can choose to enter just one irregularity in the image. Or, I can set the frame exactly parallel to rows of trees.

Baumschule #010 28”x28” 2010
© Gerco de Ruijter
Please visit Baumschule, by Gerco de Ruijter for the full size image.

While working on this new series, I learn to understand more about the functions of shadow and light; the relationships of fore and background, and of the trees and the land where they are planted.

Even though this series “Baumschule” deals with an extremely defined cultural landscape, it are the abnormalities that jump into view. The presence of all of these objects arranged to form rows creates a new form of abstraction, not because of the image’s emptiness but, to the contrary, because of the presence of so many “things”, and their patterns and rhythms.

Funny, the irregularities in the patterns cause the viewer to once again notice nature…

Please visit Gerco de Ruijter website for more aerial photography of the Dutch landscape.

Baumschule #024 28”x28” 2009
© Gerco de Ruijter
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Text and photographs by Eoin O Conaill.

As an outline to my style of work and working I can explain how my attraction to photographing the everyday landscape began. I did not have a strong interest in photography from a young age and in truth happened upon a course in photography and continued from this course to a degree and to a point where I held a qualification and a strong idea of what I wanted to say but was unsure how to say it. I wanted to look at the landscape around me, to explore my own country and in many ways to try to gain a better understanding of what it is to be Irish and where I fit into all of this. I had always been drawn to photography and art that gave me space to interpret images in my own way, work that did not have all the answers but had plenty of questions. A phrase by Winogrand I heard recently describes this very well “nothing is as mysterious as a fact clearly described”. The likes of Walker Evans and Stephen Shore and an Irish painter Martin Gale presented scenes with a strong sense of intrigue that drew you in to try to interpret what the artist was saying. Very direct composition yet quiet, and crossing the lines between art, documentary and archive, these works offered a way for me to examine the immediate world around me and to grasp how the collective identity of place can be explored through photography.

To Let
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

The need to photograph around my home country Ireland came about a number of years after finishing my studies. My job meant that I traveled around my native city Dublin for hours on end – sitting in traffic on wet evening or early winter mornings. These moments of being stuck in in-between places forced me to look around at the everyday spaces we inhabit. The feeling and the ambiance – those dull yet intense moments when you glimpse something special in a place you have passed a thousand times. The landscape around us encapsulates history in the physical form and can be viewed in many different ways, a simple street scene on the outskirts of Dublin holds so many different meanings and histories when viewed by an elderly resident of the area, a young person newly arrived in the area or a tourist passing through. I am constantly trying to grasp what is of interest in a scene, looking deeper to understand the layers within the landscape, where architecture, history, politics, culture and personality come together. I had also not seen the reality of Irish weather incorporated within contemporary Irish photography and I wanted to be true to this aspect of living on an island facing the Atlantic Ocean where rain and mist come to dominate at certain times of the year.

Cab office
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

This project “Common Place” is about photographing the places we pass daily, the estates and side streets that we often take no notice of but that contain all the information necessary to highlight the political and social issues that are prevalent in the country. This project was made in 2006-2007 during the height of the economic boom where prosperity had transformed many of the notions that were seen as “Irish” and certainly the perception of ourselves as a nation and of this country internationally was changing. It felt almost like a re branding exercise was in motion, this idea of the modern cosmopolitan country of landmark developments were being pushed to the fore. I wanted to highlight the distance I believed existed between the reality of our everyday existence and the stereotype of place, recognizing the large changes occurring both culturally, socially and physically without making this change the sole focus of the work. This project therefore addresses the recurring enigma of trying to document and represent social and physical change without the obvious visual pointers but looking instead to the everyday landscape where buildings wait to be transformed, where subtle changes hint at what has passed and what is to come, where the optimism and base reality of human existance are witnessed as a people survive, possibly strive and generally get by.

Molloys
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

This is a shot taken on the edge of a housing estate in the Moyross area of Limerick city. Molloy’s shows a typical housing estate and is a type of vernacular architecture that can be witnessed on the outskirts of many towns and cities throughout Ireland. This image demonstrates many of the points I am making in my work. In the left middle distance the small detail of a big new landmark office development can be seen on the skyline. However these are isolated areas marked for development and the rest of the country remains very much the same where there is a gulf between what is happening in isolated areas and what is happening everywhere else is evident. Development on the ground show a more subtle addition and layering of the architecture where a few new houses have been attached to the older structures – the constant layering of the built environment where an extension is built here or a new house there will form the legacy to the now distant years of prosperity in the general landscape.

Car Park Attendant, Derry
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

The image Car Park Attendant, Derry, highlights the contradiction inherent within the landscape where the subtle shift can be witness as the local is being overtaken by the global. Where the attendant sits in his hut, not yet replaced by the smart-card speed of the newer multi-story car-parks and as in Molloys, the local small privately owned shops have not yet been swallowed by the large shop multiples and not yet been re branded as a Spar, Centra or Mace – soon to happen. Despite the rapid sweep of global processes and pressures, the local and human still holds some sway.

Emo
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

As with all of my works, I find that I work best as an explorer searching for landscapes that are visually interesting and speak of a place and time. I don’t believe it is possible to pin point beforehand the photograph or project you want to make or that it is possible to go out with a direct point or message that you hope to visualize. For me the phrase “ ideas emerge through discovery” is important as you must look deeply and photograph heavily to find in the landscape what is important to the body of photographs you are working on. For example this work began as a much wider and more open exploration of the landscape of Ireland that gradually emerged into the project Common Place. The aim was very much that exploration, a way for me to look at the landscape that I am so familiar with to try to figure my place within it – to discover my view of it. Like any creative fields, you begin with an idea that will evolve and both expand and contract during the course of the project, finishing at the point where the final edit takes place.

Overview
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

A recent commission on a small Island in southern Ireland has brought me away from the more general views witnessed in “Common Place” to a more personal, more challenging piece of work in certain ways. Again the focus is firmly on the everyday space and to the subtle views of where people live, work and spend time but this project takes on a more inclusive and personal viewpoint where I am trying to highlight what factors combine to create a community and an identity of place.

This work will be exhibited in the coming months and a larger selection of the work is included on my website www.eoinoconaill.com.

Centra
© Eoin O Conaill
Please visit In search of the Common Place, by Eoin O Conaill for the full size image.

Text and photographs by Lajos Geenen.

Since moving to New York City from Amsterdam 6 years ago, I have seen my neighborhood change in a dramatic way.

At the time of my move, I chose to live in Long Island City, a rough industrial area, which is just across the East River from 42nd Street in Manhattan. In the beginning, it was a quiet neighborhood with an almost village-like feel to it. The vast empty spaces and unused land were an integral part of this great neighborhood, setting a rough and desolate stage for the skyline of New York.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

But slowly these spaces were filled up.  New glass and steel towers were going up along the riverfront, and old buildings further inland were being torn down to make room for new condominiums. In addition to these new buildings, a new, palpable tension was also going up in the neighborhood.

Tension between old-timers and new residents was growing. Partly because the new construction was only accessible to the (perceived) wealthy newcomers, but also because the old residents felt like they were being enclosed and trapped by these new buildings.  Not only did it change their neighborhood physically, but it made them feel like strangers in the place where most of them grew up. The obstruction of dearly held views became a visual manifestation of these feelings.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

I have mixed feelings when I encounter these embittered neighbors because I sympathize with the old timers even though I’m one of the newer ones. I am probably perceived as an outsider by them, even though I’ve been here since before the new building frenzy started. Living in one of the old walk-up buildings makes it a little better in their eyes, but they still consider you “not one of us.”  

Over time, they slowly warmed up to me. Dragging my Cambo 4×5 camera around the neighborhood was a recognizable sight, and I became less of an outsider. Most of the old timers who have lived here all their lives could remember that when they were young, pictures were taken with a camera like this. So a connection was formed, in part through just seeing me around the neighborhood, and being open and friendly.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

The main complaint of the old timers is that they perceive the new “tower” people as arrogant (even though they almost never interact with them). But when you question them why they felt that way, there was never a clear answer. And it often ended up with a comment about how “they” took all the parking spaces.

Since parking is free in some parts of the neighborhood, this was a hot button issue.  I was often told, when I pointed out that free street parking was for everyone, that if they could afford to live in the towers, they should also pay for parking in the garages that were built at the same time and were sitting half-empty.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

Long Island City continues to change. New people keep moving in, and sometimes you catch yourself feeling like the old crew with mixed feelings about it. The feeling is less directed toward the people moving in, it has more to do with what it will do to the neighborhood. People like the small stores and artist community, but as a result of all these new people moving in, rents are going up and the people who made the neighborhood cool are forced to move away.   

And because people don’t interact, both groups have a distorted view of “the other” and make gross assumptions. I’ve been playing soccer with a lot of people who live in the new buildings, as well as with people who have lived here all their lives, and I know that the newcomers are not all rich Wall Street bankers. Many of them live with roommates or with their family in a one bedroom. Hardly the picture of wealth.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

I resisted the temptation to photograph the “old timers” in run-down parts of the area, or for that matter shooting them against the shiny new buildings to create a feeling of “alienation.”
Instead, I wanted to make this a very personal story and stay away from general statements. I wanted to concentrate on how this was affecting me directly.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

So I photographed my own perspective and how it was affected by all the new construction.

In the beginning I wanted to document how the view was at the moment before the big building frenzy took over the neighborhood. And since then, every time I felt a major change was about to take place. 

It felt like I was standing guard to “catch” the action as it was unfolding, almost as a futile attempt to stop time literally, by taking a photograph. 

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

After I started the project, I read a history of the neighborhood. I learned that the church across the street from my building had originally been built in 1893. It was destroyed in a huge fire and was immediately rebuilt to open again in October, 1894. Interestingly, the fact that the view from my building is partially blocked by this church has never bothered me much. It certainly didn’t bother me as much as the new buildings that are being built and altering my existing views.

So why are we less irritated with the buildings that block our views that were already there before us?  The new ones we witness going up are the evil ones, but those old buildings that were blocking someone else’s view when first constructed are somehow okay.  

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

When we’re born in a particular place, or grow up there, or move to it and become used to it, we consider that how we see it is the baseline for how it should be. We ignore or remain ignorant of all the changes that came before us, and feel almost entitled to have the situation “frozen in time” until we move somewhere else. And then the whole cycle starts all over again. 

By documenting the slow but certain demise of these views, or perceptions thereof, I’m visualizing my own relationship to this problem. As both a newcomer and someone who decided to live in an old building instead of the new towers, I was trying to relate to the feeling of suffocation that was described to me by some older residents, but was having a hard time doing so.  Maybe it was the location of my fourth floor walkup apartment, or the lack of fear of being pushed out of the neighborhood, but it could also be a cultural-generational issue.  

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

If you have lived somewhere all your life with no knowledge of anywhere else, or feel less mobile for financial reasons, it might be more difficult to be flexible and accept change. It is then understandable to feel isolation and suffocation, of feeling the aggression of being slowly closed in upon with nowhere to go but leave the neighborhood.    

Precincts refers to the sections of the neighborhood that have changed so much over time, as well as the “enclosed space” that these images were shot from. Since all images have a similar high perspective and subtle visual clues of “overlap”, there is a suggestion that the series may have been taken from one apartment.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

In an ironic twist, when this project came close to being finished, I was told by my “old timer” landlord that he wanted my apartment for his son, and that I had to move out in a month.  I ended up in one of the new buildings that was blocking my view.

Soon I will see my old neighborhood from a new perspective, high above it all, and hopefully will never be blocked by new construction, although that’s a promise nobody can give anyone here in New York City.

Please visit Lajos Geenen website for more content.

© Lajos Geenen
Please visit Precincts, by Lajos Geenen for the full size image.

Text and photographs by TerraProject collective¹.

friendly fire: noun Military, “Weapon fire coming from one’s own side, esp. fire that causes accidental injury or death to one’s own forces.”

Oxford dictionary

Castel Volturno, Naples. Antonio Sepe, father of Luca, a soldier in the italian army that died from a Hodgkin Lymphoma after returning from a mission in Kosovo.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

This is a story which follows the words of Italian Army and volunteer personnel who served during the Balkan wars in 1995 and 1999 in what are today the territories of Bosnia and Kosovo. Their voices, or, for those who left us, the ones of their family members, present a dramatic leitmotiv: the insurgence of the so-called Balkan Syndrome. Since the end of the war, more than 200 members of the Italian Army have died and 2500 are sick, without an official instigator, but with a disturbing series of doubts and hidden truths. The uncertainty of the cause does not deny the vehemence of the cancers that represent the core of the Balkan Syndrome.

Pierluigi Ontanetti, 53 years old, volunteered in Sarajevo during the war taking in and out the mail from the siege. After the end of the war he came back to Bosnia many times. In 2003 his doctors discovered a form of leukemia.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

Among the candidates of this sickness, depleted uranium weapons seem the most probable. These weapons have become increasingly popular in the most recent conflicts due to their enormous explosive capability, able to destroy bunkers and armored tanks. Once they explode, they release clouds of mildly radioactive heavy metal dusts. Independent research studies have shown that heavy metal nanoparticles are very toxic for living organisms, and once in a body, they get accumulated in tissues and can cause the proliferation of cancer cells. Mary Olson, a nuclear waste specialist at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, stated that “ingested DU particles can cause up to 1,000 times the damage of an X-ray”.

Giuseppe Ciotola, 32 years old, from Naples. Giuseppe suffers from a form of leukemia caused by the inhalation of heavy-metals nanoparticles, as diagnosed by Dr. Gatti. Giuseppe has been discharged by the Italian Army and does not receive any pension. He now works as a part-time mechanic in Treviso.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

But truth, again, is a fugitive. In 2005, Italian Defense minister Antonio Martino claimed that “our soldiers don’t have any risk with depleted uranium: they don’t use it, and neither do the soldiers of other countries”. Documents have instead revealed that depleted uranium weapons had been used in may conflicts, from the Gulf War in 1991, to Bosnia in 1995, the Balkans in 1999, to today’s Iraq and Afghanistan. It is thought that between 17 to 20 countries possess depleted uranium weapons in their arsenals. These include the U.S., the UK, France, Russia, China, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Pakistan, Thailand, Iraq, and Taiwan.

Radioactive graffiti on the wall of an apartment in Hadzici, the most targeted city by NATO in Bosnia.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

However our project had another aim than a journalistic investigation. After meeting, and photographing, in 2006, sick soldiers or families of dead ones, we wanted to move our visual research in those lands where these people were most probably exposed to the deadly contamination.

View of Mount Igman in the outskirts of Sarajevo, one of the most bombed target by NATO in Bosnia.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

The opportunity arrived at the end of 2009, when we were contacted by curator Claudi Carreras and invited to take part in a group exhibition of 20 collectives from south America and Europe on the topic of environment. For us this represented the pretext for continuing our project, and we began organizing it.

Bosnia. On the road between Sarajevo and Pale.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

Telling a story from the past and looking for an invisible subject such as pollution was the main challenge of this project. We decided to be driven, in our research, by the recounting of the days of the war of an Army veteran, one Red Cross member, one volunteer, and the father of a dead soldier. Their words, at times full of pathos and strong images, at times lost in the desolation of a distant past, were coupled with the actual map of the bombing done by NATO, and documents we collected that could provide information on the attack sites in Bosnia and Kosovo.

Bosnia. Inside the Hadžići tank repair facility, former Hadzici ammunition storage, heavily bombed by NATO during the Bosnian war and where UNEP confirmed the presence of radioactive "hot spots" and pieces of DU weapons. Hadžići was a Muslim settlement during the war and witnessed the most intense bombing of the war. Most Muslims from Hadžići now live in the small town of Bratunac, in eastern Bosnia. The rate of tumors among the survivors is the highest of the country.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

We split the areas of investigation among the four of us, and opted to visit the countries during the coldest months, imagining the symbolic power of snow covering the landscape. For us, the candid layer of ice could represent both the manifestation of the invisible, yet powerful, force that has taken away so many lives and has polluted the environment, and the cold and silent welcome of institutions towards these sick people, most of whom have never received any recognition for their illness or financial support from the Government or Army.

Kosovo. On the road between Mitrovica and Pec.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

Bosnia and Kosovo offered to our eyes a particularly cold and snowy weather, fostering the message we wanted to pass through our images. We visited cities and the mountain villages, met with locals and interviewed some. But mostly we traveled on roads and among scenarios which witnessed war. Our visual research was done through the utilization of abstract elements instead of actual, exact, objective, description of the situation. We looked for moments, shapes, landscapes, which could induce the viewer to think about the vulnerability of the environment and humans, and the scars that war leaves on them, invisible, for years. This aesthetic approach represented somehow a variation from our usual methodology, done often through portraits and with a more direct documental structure. However, this solution proved an interesting challenge for our collective and the final result showed a great coherence. At the same time, we decided not to forget the informative, documentary component of our research, which always represents a crucial endeavor of our work. We thought that the words and memories of the four subjects could have helped the viewer to understand the historical as well as personal backgrounds of the account, as well a represent a testimony which he had the duty to preserve and spread. For this reason we recorded the interviews and edited a video.

Kosovo. A forest near Batlava.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

When defining the project, and the utilization of both photographs and video, we kept in mind the layout of the exhibition. The idea was to present each portrait in the center, surrounded by four landscapes all from the areas visited by the subject during the years of the wars, forming a unity which could represent the memories of each person in those lands. The video had an important role and we foresaw the utilization of a large screen or projector, which had to be mounted along with the prints. The curator of the exhibition understood the importance of these different media and gave us all the necessary instruments to exhibit our material.

Kosovo. On the road between Pec and Dakovica.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

Our work is in progress: in the future we are planning to visit Bosnia and Kosovo, this time meeting and photographing the civilians that lived those moments and some of whom bear the permanent memory of the bombings. We believe that our story can help people understand the consequences that conflicts can have on humans and nature even in the distant future. We also believe that we should not forget how the same weapons, the same armaments are being used today, and the same actions will bear those repercussions that we can witness, after more than a decade, in the Balkans.

For more on our work please visit the gallery on our website TerraProject or the material posted for the traveling exhibition.

Kosovo. Ruins on the road between Pec and Dakovica.
© Terra Project
Please visit Friendly Fire – back to the Balkans, by TerraProject for the full size image.

1. Michele Borzoni, Simone Donati, Pietro Paolini, Rocco Rorandelli.

Text and photographs by Sarah Moore.

How can I talk about loneliness? After all, there are thousands of different types of loneliness. There are thousands more ways to experience it, describe it, or deal with it. Loneliness and its synonyms are so vague, so personal, and so elusive that it seems nearly impossible to address them.

So how do I talk about my experience with loneliness? This has been a question for me perhaps all my life. In fact, loneliness was so integrated in my life for so long that I didn’t even notice it. Yet, after moving from my home state of South Dakota to Rhode Island, where I attended school, this loneliness suddenly felt different. It felt more pronounced, more painful. How could I talk about this new loneliness through my art? How could I even begin to think about it, let alone picture it and share it?

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

I have written this as a statement of my work titled expanse:

“Throughout the years, I have become increasingly interested in my home of South Dakota and how the people and place shaped me and continue to influence me.

Even though I appreciate many aspects of the Midwest, it represents the pinnacle of the loneliness in my life. When I return, I inevitably regress to feelings of isolation, something I tried to escape my entire life.

My photography depicts the aspects of South Dakota that represent this loneliness for me. The landscape is beautiful but empty, simple but overwhelming. My relationships are based on love, but also thwarted by distance.

Expanses can be comforting but also stifling. Distance can fuel love but also misunderstanding. The vast space of the Midwestern land is something I can’t quite embrace, break free from, or understand, but it provides infinite inspiration for me.”

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

This statement makes so much sense to me, but I also barely understand it at all. Why does South Dakota provide such inspiration for me? This is the place that saddened me most, that I couldn’t wait to escape from, and that I dread returning to. Yet, with this sadness and dread comes inevitable longing and inspiration. I’ve relentlessly tried to figure this paradox out.

I’ve realized that if anything can describe the ungraspable emotions I feel towards my home, my past, and my family, it’s the land of South Dakota. This land not only provides inspiration for me, but it provides answers and explanations. Perhaps more than anything else I do or say, my photographs from home provide insight into my feelings, and perhaps into those of many others.

“Tell them there was a cow. It was in the field, near where you held the fence. Tell them the cow stood there all day, chewing at something it had swallowed long ago, and looking at you. Tell them how the cow’s face had no expression on it. How it stood there all day, looking at you with a big face that had no expression.”

David Foster Wallace

After a lot of floundering, thinking, writing, and questioning, I had a photographic breakthrough of sorts in October of 2008. I went home for about five days, prepared to make enough images to get me through until I could return in December. I knew documenting wasn’t working, and I knew that my landscapes were becoming more metaphoric to my feelings of loneliness. Armed with these preconceptions, I photographed at home much differently.

Some of my most successful photographs came from this trip to South Dakota. A lot of them were too intuitive to be completely purposeful. I continued taking self-portraits and some documents, but I spent most of my time out in the landscape. I photographed myself in the land and my mom in the land. I finally started to use the expanse of South Dakota’s terrain to represent the stifling emotions I felt at home.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

There are a few crucial elements and ideas to my project expanse. Most I realized after the photographs came together; some I realized before I even started photographing. Self-portraiture, the landscape, diptychs and triptychs, repetition, and a certain color pallet are all important aspects of my work.

I now realize that self-portraiture has been important to me for a long time. I have made dozens of self-portraits in the past year and a half. Photographing myself is at once easy, as I’m a model I always have access to, but it’s also much more complex. I thought for a long time that the distance and loneliness found in South Dakota was simple. People grow apart and relationships become strained and what was once close becomes distant.

The distance between my family members and myself is different. It’s a result of physical distance, but it’s also a result of built-up emotional restraint. It’s a result of divorce, secrecy, betrayal, lies, anger, pain, and sadness. It’s a result of a complex home life floating in an overwhelmingly empty and stifling landscape. If I can photograph myself in this land, with some of these people, then I can start to show the other layers.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

The self-portraiture in my work is a way for me to show some of these layers in a direct, confrontational, and controlled way. There are seven self-portraits in this series so far. The first and the last were taken about nine months apart. There are four images of me alone, two of my mom and myself, and one of my older sister and myself. These portraits allow me to show the loneliness I personally feel, and they also allow me to show the distance between my family and myself. Seeing the same person in multiple images portrays loneliness over distance and over time.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

From the beginning, the landscape has been crucial to my work. At first, I simply took landscapes because I found joy in them. The Midwestern land is something I will probably never grow tired of photographing. The complete flatness of the land is so beautiful, and also so complex. Wherever you turn, you run into what appears to be the same view: expanses of fields, lone roads, and huge skies. With such sameness, the subtleties become incredibly important. Much like photographing the same person over and over again, photographing the land of South Dakota is a lesson in observation and acknowledgement of small changes.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

The landscapes also represent the ultimate metaphor for the emotional content of my work. Photographing the land provided a respite from a complex home life. At the same time, the landscape of the Midwest can be incredibly depressing and lonely, which is exactly what it was for the first eighteen years of my life. The land on its own can be whatever the viewer wants it to be–daunting, relaxing, depressing, hopeful, boring, inspirational. When there are people in the land, it can exaggerate distance, discomfort, loneliness, awkwardness, and emotional claustrophobia. Expanses can indeed be stifling.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

My use of diptychs and triptychs came from a need to heighten the overwhelming land of South Dakota. A single image couldn’t show the ubiquitous flatness, so I started creating panoramas that emphasized this. Horizon lines are an important visual and conceptual aspect to my work, and expanding these lines allowed viewers to better understand my ideas.

The multi-paneled images have become much than just an aesthetic choice. Piecing together two or three photographs allowed me to break up both people and land. I could guide my viewer through an image by using focus and lines in diptychs and triptychs. I could put my mom in the middle of a three-panel photograph to emphasize her aloneness next to the vastness of the land. I could break apart my own head in a diptych to at once push myself to the edges of a single frame and also join them to create a seemingly whole portrait. I could put different figures in different panels to exaggerate physical distance. And, of course, I could break up my horizon lines to address the confusion of this landscape and debunk the idea that it is easy to understand.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

I used repetition a lot in this project. It’s hard not to repeat a landscape that is actually so similar everywhere you turn, and it’s hard not to repeat when self-portraiture was used so often. Facial expressions, poses, lighting, seasons, and sequencing kept this repetition from becoming boring. The same people and same landscape kept this repetition working conceptually. My loneliness in South Dakota didn’t just occur once or twice, but every time I went home. It also doesn’t just occur when I go home, but other is instead an integrated part of my personality, for better or worse. I wanted to portray the Midwest as I felt it, and I as I continue to feel some other places. Sometimes hitting the same note over and over again can be a wondrous form of poetry.

The color pallet of my project is composed of many browns, beiges, and grays. I used the occasional bright color, in a scarf or road perhaps, to break up the monotonous color scheme. Subtle colors shifts in the land and sky were the most captivating to me: when the light changed just barely from blue to gray to red, and when the ground swayed from dark to light brown within one plain. As long as I could control my lighting and color choices, I could better dictate how the photographs would be read.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

“When do you know when something is becoming something that changes you?”

Daniel Handler

Throughout the course of this project, I have learned a lot about my personal loneliness and distance. I haven’t answered a lot of questions, but I’ve been capable of at least asking them. The vague concept of loneliness, the universal idea of home, and the personal ideals of land have come closer to being within my grasp.

I still don’t know what these photographs say to or about my family. The project evolved from a personal place to an even more personal one. I know what I see when I look at these photographs, and I know what a select few friends, teachers, and peers see, but I’m not sure what the universal statement is. Yet, I’ve always liked my work to be slightly ambiguous, slightly hard to hold onto. I tend to not like the obvious; I’m not an obvious person. All along, I’ve just hoped that if I produce images that really mean something to me, then perhaps they’ll mean something to others.

I said before that I could photograph the Midwestern landscape forever. I know this is true, but I’m also not sure if it will always have something important to say to me. This project hasn’t come to an end yet; if anything, I’ve just begun. I don’t know how long I’ll continue using my family and my homeland to talk about my personal ideas. I’ve learned that I can address things best through the land, but this doesn’t have to be a particular space. Expanses will always be important to me, but I know I can find them everywhere and through almost everyone. I hope to continue to tie emotions to the outer world, whatever and wherever they may be.

© Sarah Katherine Moore
Please visit Expanse, by Sarah Katherine Moore for the full size image.

Text and photographs by David Pollock.

The pictures in this series entitled Sign, Symbol and Nature were made during 2008-2009 with a 4×5 view camera which I use for mainly two reasons. First, this type of camera slows the process down and reinforces my interest in the smaller details within the frame. Second, I want the subject matter, when reproduced as 61 x 76 or 81 x102 prints, to possess such high definition that they appear hyper-real. From the 4×5 transparencies generated, scans are done and I printed the final selections as pigment prints. The printing is an important and almost invisible part of the process and since the advent of digital printing, I have had more control of the image than ever before.

Whale Mural, Victoria
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

While my intention in this written piece is to provide some background to my thinking and processes, my words are not meant to explain away the images but rather to provide a portal to interact with them.

One of my aims is to provide the viewer with an experience that is not unlike simply looking. By layering from foreground to background and mostly using frontal lighting, deep space is accentuated and an emphasis is placed on the viewer’s relationship to the observed. In other words, I mean to situate the Self in a singular relationship, not only with the apparent fact of the world before us, but also our symbolic representations.

Douglas Street, Victoria
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

Below is a quote I recently read from the French writer and art critic Charles Baudelaire, a central figure in the birth of Modern art, written at the same time as the art and science of photography was first evolving:

The whole universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform.

Motel, Sidney
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

These words fundamentally describe my practice of photography as a presentation of the everyday world whereby the decoding of cultural symbols is a means to a revelation of the otherwise invisible.

This project’s original subject matter was centered around a historically significant harbor near downtown Victoria, where I live, situated on Vancouver Island, off the west coast of Canada. Through this process, I began to consider this island’s ongoing transformation from primarily a resource-based economy to a tourist one. I started to make photographs that reflect this transition from the physical (resources) to the representational (tourism). I wanted these pictures to be of this place and its history so as to resonate beyond my point of view.

Town of Lake, Cowichan
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

Prior to, and concurrent with, this project I read The Denial of Death by cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker which changed my way of seeing. Many of my images are concerned with the symbolic representation of nature in a constructed landscape. Through my interpretation of Becker, I started to perceive our relationship to the natural world as one that is mediated by romantic ideals of beauty, harmony and purity and that our representations of nature can be seen as attempts to frame the chaos of the natural world within the markers of familiar cultural symbols. It is the garden, or cultured nature, that is often depicted in myth as Paradise. I see the story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden as the fall from the protection of culture and the resulting consciousness of their own mortality.

Real Estate Sign, Langford
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

A central photograph of this series is Real Estate Sign, Langford.

This picture was the most immediate as it was composed with much less setup time than I usually need. It was early morning, overcast and misty, and I was only researching locations the weather was too inclement for picture-making. This photograph is a document, an embodiment of my emotional response and an opportunity to present ideas surrounding cultural perception along with symbolic associations.

Brea water, Victoria
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

Like many of the pictures in this group, it is the scale of things that creates tension and ambiguity. The out-of-kilter size relationships in this picture, and the flat light and grey background contribute to the appearance of these subjects as objects in a studio tabletop setup. I am interested in these devices because through them we can recognize the artifice of these pictures and experience them not only as windows, but also as representations. The photograph within this photograph, as a mediator of our experience, represents the promise of a bright future complete with ocean views.

Whol sale Food Company, Victoria
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

It is the photograph that dominates the landscape here as it the only colored and vibrant element. This, however, is the wasteland with the cross and the gallows in the distance. Even the words reveal a hidden meaning: a hierarchy of signs starting at the bottom with the body –Spa, Restaurant, Fitness–and our search for a perfect victory over death. Above that, the words wem>Dramatic Architecturew/em> which brings us to art and culture, and at the top, is the spiritual–Ocean Views. Sometimes photography, in all of its apparent factuality, can paradoxically show us evidence that things are often not all that they seem.

Theme Park, Langford
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

I used the following story in an artist’s talk to illustrate some of the content of the work. This story surrounds the image Theme Park, Langford.

I asked the workers at this theme park construction site to allow me to photograph within it. A young man, 18 years -old or so, who was working there approached me (as many people often do when I am in the field) and asked, “So, what are you photographing?” This is often a difficult question to answer, but I thought I had it well in hand with my response. “I am photographing a landscape, within a landscape.” This was indeed one of the aspects of what I was photographing. He went back to work and so did I. A little while later he came back and said, “So…landscape within a landscape …?” He wanted more. I thought to myself, “Okay, let’s get into it.” I talked about our idealization of nature, images of paradise, the gap between the real and the ideal, notions of beauty associated with nature, and that a major aspect of culture is that of an anxiety-reducing repression of our primal fear of death and decay associated with nature. After this he said, “You mean like how they wrap the electrical boxes in pictures of nature?” (Here in Victoria the city has beautified urban electrical boxes vinyl-wrapping them with photographs of nature scenes).-I said, “That’s what I’m talking about!” (I was happy and excited by that the connection had been made.)

Parking Lot, Colwood
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

I made the picture and as I was packing up he ran up to me and asked, “Can you do me a favor?” I said, “Sure.” He said, “I’d like to take a picture of your camera.” I said, “A photographer should always be aware of the direction of the light source.” I turned the 4×5 camera around to face the sun that was at my back so that as he crouched down to photograph my camera with his digital point-and-shoot, the image I had just made would also appear within his frame behind my camera. I knew he would show this picture (which would include aspects of my picture) to his friends and that maybe he would talk about what we had discussed.

We are all tourists in the contemporary landscape.

For more informations and photos, please visit David Pollock website.

Ogden Point Docks, Victoria
© David Pollock
Please visit Sign, Symbol and Nature, by David Pollock for the full size image.

Text and photographs by Sankar Sridhar.

The invitation to contribute to this blog has come at a time when a needling regret was just beginning to surface yet again. It has been nearly a six months since Urghyen passed away. I learnt about it when I had gone to visit him. I was told that his daughter, Nyima, has married and moved to her husband’s household. She’ll never walk the old trails again. To find her in the maze of mental maps criss-crossing the high-altitude desert that is the Changtang will be a mammoth task. I don’t know if I ever will get to meet her again. A relationship seven years in the making has ended, just like that.

Urghyen and, to a lesser degree, Nyima have been instrumental in helping me love Ladakh, the trans-Himalayan desert in the northern tip of India that shares its border with China. For a long time, it was only for Urghyen that I retraced my steps there, a zero-carbon-footprint journey necessitated by the roadlessness of the land he called home. He made me love him, and the Changtang, enough to throw away my job, twice, so I could live his life.

A recent picture of Urghyen, taken in January 2010.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

Yes, my journeys into this Himalayan shadowland have culminated in a book that has done well in the market. Yes, I had been visiting Ladakh for four years before meeting Urghyen and Nyima. Yes, I have made many journeys in Ladakh that have not involved meeting Urghyen. But truth be told, much more than images and the odd award, and books and travelogues in magazines, I thank Urghyen and Nyima for teaching me how to love a region written off time and again as desolate, harsh and lifeless.

If I have grown to be content with what I have even while living in the city, where flaunting material possessions comes second only to the necessity of acquiring them, it is in no small measure for Urghyen. And he must be given complete credit for instilling in me the courage, the faith even, to get up and going solo across Ladakh, a land of emptiness on such a grand scale that I have seen trekkers break down and cry because they have lost sight of their team behind a sand dune or a mountain pass.

Winter on the Changtang. Even though the region receives very little snowfall, everything liquid freezes. Here Changpas and horse share the same water from a thawed pool in a frozen stream. The thumb rule among the tribe in such situations--never collect water from downstream.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

Urghyen was a Changpa, a nomad of Tibetan stock who moved into India’s Changtang plateau across the unmanned borders several decades ago. I met his daughter, Nyima, while heading to a roadhead to begin a trek. Upon my request, she had taken me to he home, and there, Urghyen invited me in and later accepted me as family. He even gave me a name — Thamo, which meant “The Thin One” in Ladakhi. Over time and many travels, much of which was with Urghyen and his flock, I began to realize what a wonderful a life they led. There will be many who would disagree — many Changpas, after all, have almost no access to modern medicine, schools are not much heard of, and they live in eternal migration with their sheep and goats and yaks, moving from one pasture to the next. Rain is a rarity in these places, and temperatures soar to 48C in summer and dip to -45C in winter.

Survival is hard work in winter and entails walking as much as 20km a day to collect shrubs that can be used as fuel. The hearth in a Changpa rebo (yak-hair tent) burns through day and night during the seven months of winter. Droppings and wood make up the fuel sources.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

But Urghyen never found any reason to complain. He was bolted to the Changtang with firmness as astute as that of a believer. This land, where only the hardiest of species survived, was his home. And he loved it for the way it was, living true to the faith he followed — Buddhism. And he lived well, he said. “I breathe clean air, I have all the space I want. People in the city need all the medicines they can have because they are unhappy. Happy people stay healthy.” And as for education, he knew and had passed down to Nyima all the knowledge that was needed to survive in these high plains. He knew where water was to be found in each season. He knew prime grazing patches. He knew how to help a goat deliver a kid and keep them safe from predators. He knew where the 90kph winds would not rip apart his tent. He knew which clouds would bring rain and which would only raise false hopes.

Water kicked up by gusty winds freeze midair on the Changtang during extreme cold snaps, when temperatures can fall more than 10C in seconds. If such cold snaps come frequently, Changpas head to lower altitudes (around 15,000feet above sea level), as seen in the picture, to ensure their livestock's survival.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

He was happy with his tent, his flock of pashmina sheep, and the traders to whom he would sell the fine undercoat that goes into making the much-sought-after fabric for shawls and stoles.

Being a nomad was a lifestyle he cherished, faults and all, quite like we do our ways of life. It was an acceptance, a happy acceptance, not a helpless surrender as many may point out. And in my time with him (on and off, much, much more than two years), he convinced me enough to respect his way of life rather than consider him an oddity because he lived in a manner far removed from what I was used to.

Availability of water remains the single-most important prerequisite for the choice of a Changpa camping ground. Often, pastures don't come with it. Changpas make the most of the cool dawns to head out to graze their sheep and goats, sometimes over 8km one way.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

I don’t know when, but the Ladakh that began as only a mountain-grit region of peaks and altitude transformed into a living, breathing land, and I, a traveler without an agenda. Somewhere during my travels I let go of the map, the trekking trails, the urge to get to a place with a name by evening. There was no hurry, no destination to get to. I lived in the faith that when I ran out of rations, I’d find help. More often than not I did. Over time, like Urghyen, I feared not about getting lost, but about being found. In the past seven years, the only signs of humans, other than the Changpas, I have seen on my travels have been the litter mindless trekkers intent on bagging bragging rights have left behind.

The vagaries of weather show on the face of three-year-old Trinley. The scorching sun, extreme cold and whiplashing winds, not to mention the singeing heat of the hearth, all conspire to lend the Changpa the weathered, wisened look at an early age.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

As the army has built more roads into its heart and magazines and newspapers have touted Ladakh as the ultimate adventure destination, so too has the level of litter increased along roads and trekking trails. Empty beer bottles, cola cans, polythene bags and a whole lot more crowds trekking routes today. Each time Urghyen came across another stash, his eyes would give away the hurt he felt at the defilement of his home.

Urghyen has seen, as have I, the sudden bureaucratic decision to demarcate part of the Changtang as a national reserve, off limits to the Changpas. The reason? Man-animal conflict. It was strange that in the entire range of the animals that inhabit Ladakh, they have dealt with the Changpas, and the Changpas with them, ever since either can remember. Urghyen had moved, but never understood how someone who might never have visited Ladakh decided the Changpas are doing the terrain more harm than good, while fuel-guzzling SUVs offroading on the same terrain caused no damage to the environment or wildlife.

For a tribe that counts its wealth in heads of goats, every birth brings added anxiety. Here Lamho warms an orphaned kid with love even as she prepares lunch for her family.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

It was on a day when he was depressed that he asked me to take pictures of his people, his home, and show it to “my kind” in the city so they could learn to love the impressive and fragile land. When you love someone or something, he would say, you’d be willing to give up your life to protect it.

No newspaper or magazine would be very keen on recording the passing away of a nomad. And not many would spare space for personal emotions. Even without Urghyen, I find myself drawn to this part of the Himalayas, ploughing ever deeper and away from trekking trails to discover new landscapes that would have made even Urghyen stop a moment more and appreciate it.

Yaks are the only animals truly suited to survival in the extreme temperatures. So much so, the Changpa drive the yak to higher altitudes even as winter sets it. The animals roam freely in herds and are rounded up again post winter.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.

The images in this series are part of a collection that Urghyen has seen, and appreciated. There are some recent ones as well, which he might gaze upon now and smile. They are an attempt to set the community of the Changpas in context with their environment and lifestyles, through the seasons. Urghyen felt some images could make at least some people ponder on the frailty of the balance in the Himalayas and goad them to be better hikers and mountaineers. I, too, can only hope that the images that brought a smile on the face of Urghyen — a man as used to the majestic landscapes much as we are to our surroundings — will have the same effect on admirers of the mountains.

And to my friend Urghyen, a man who measured distances in hours and time by the length of his shadow, who knew neither blog nor internet nor computer, I say this: Thank you for the giving me the gift of lack of direction, the greatest possession I shall ever have on my forays into the abode of snow.

For more great photographs and stories about Changpa nomads life in Ladaks please visit Sankar Sridhar homepage and blog.

A flock grazing sheep take on the look of a celestial constellation on an evening on the Changtang. In the foreground is the roof of a house, complete with fluttering Buddhist prayer flags. More and more Changpa are embracing a sedentary life, egged on by the government which wants them to join the mainstream. As of 2008, only 1,500 families remained rooted to their traditional ways. Urghyen's was one of them.
© Sankar Sridhar
Please visit A dedication: to Urghyen and Ladakh, by Sankar Sridhar for the full size image.