Innholdsfortegnelse for #3 2022 i Artdoc Photography Magazine

“Many lens-based artists have an innate sensitivity to the beauty, power, energy and hidden messages of plants, trees, rivers and hills.- The Artdoc Team It is widely acknowledged that our relationship with nature has been heavily distorted over the last centuries. The destructive Western approach to our natural world started with the Greek philosophy reinforced by the Christian view on man and his habitat. Their shared anthropocentric view created a dichotomy between the rational man and the allegedly ‘non-conscious’ botanical world, bereft of feelings and purposes. This hierarchy positioned humans far above plants and trees, giving the modern man the ethical right to exploit the natural world for his own benefit. But currently, everybody knows the tide is turning against the exploiter. We as humans need to refocus our view…

This paper proposes to use analogue photography as an analogy for earth processes in order to conceptually collapse the space between photo-media and nature. I use the term “analogue” to refer to nondigital, chemically-based photographic processes that use compounds such as: silver iodide (calotype), silver halide (silver-gelatine, chromogenic prints), silver nitrate and mercury (daguerreotype, wet-plate collodion), and ammonium iron citrate and potassium ferricyanide (cyanotype). Processes where the image is latent, or invisible, until it undergoes a chemical development. Exposing the inherent analogues between this photography and geophysical systems — surface, time, interaction, minerals, transformation — generates new ways to know photography. These correspondences can be seen as a distinct way to examine photography’s crucial role in how we understand the natural environment. I use the term “earth processes” to emphasize…

Des Oiseaux Albarrán Cabrera The poetic universe of Spanish photographers duo Albarrán Cabrera is presented here through a dreamscape journey in the land of birds. Between reality and illusion, their photographs questions our relationship to the tangible world and vibrate gently through a wide palette and different photographic techniques: platinum and palladium prints, cyanotypes, gelatin prints, and pigmented printing. Gravity of Light Doug and Mike Starn The first book to celebrate the full breadth of the Starn twins’ innovative photographic career. Defying categorization, Doug and Mike Starn combine traditionally separate disciplines such as science, sculpture, photography, painting, video, and installation. Gravity of Light focuses on the breadth of the Starns’ photographic work, from their critically acclaimed debut in the 1987 Whitney Biennial to their current exploration of light as a…

Most of the subject matter of the extensive body of work of Albarrán Cabrera is related to nature. In an abstract and poetic manner, they photograph landscapes with mountain views, branches, trees, leaves, blossoms, water, skies and fishes. They chose these subjects for their universal and intercultural appearance. In our conversation, Angel Albarrán and Anna Cabrera explain their choice together with one voice: “We realised that nature is everywhere and international. When photographing a tree, nobody would ask what the tree means because a tree is a tree. Nature has an abstract and universal element. Therefore, it can be abstracted from the place. For us, nature is a perfect tool to explain abstract thoughts because it is legible for everybody, as it is not culturally confined. We experienced that people…

In her artwork, Rebecca Najdowski reacts to how we frame nature in a limited way, creating an illusion that we know about it. “We have created a limited view of nature by photographing it in a repetitive way. We tend to default to a standard way of making images. It is almost like a script of how photographs of nature should be. But I think we should be paying attention to how nature has been mediated and seek out new ways to depict it.” The history of photography is moulded by the iconic and majestic photography of Ansel Adams, celebrating the beauty of the natural world. Many have criticised his work, saying he creates a myth of nature. “Growing up near National Parks in the United States, I became fascinated…

Artdoc is proud to present the many creative submissions we have received for this Art Photography exhibition. Photographers from many countries of the world, like Germany, the USA, Italy, Sweden, Slovenia, and Algeria, show that the art of photography is, in fact, the art of seeing. With a keen curiosity, an open heart and a camera, photographers turn daily experiences into personal speech and a vivid expression of their feelings about life. The concept of Art Photography might be called tautological because, throughout the ages, photography in its essence always has been art. The contemporary photographers who send their work to Artdoc prove that once and again. Visit the online exhibition Art Photography…

I think the best way to describe my approach to photography is to share my favourite quote by Rene Magritte: “Too often we tend to reduce what is strange to what is familiar. I intend to restore the familiar to the strange”. It profoundly influenced my vision. Objects, their representation and how they are perceived became a source of inquiry and inspiration. While creating an arrangement, I spent a great deal of time trying to see things in a less obvious way. I use the time carefully, taking all the variables and elements into consideration. This is an essential part of my photography process. I’m creating a new meaning by taking cues from fine art, abstract forms, texture, light and shadows. A vision can come from a sight, a memory,…

In Into the Mist I offer glimpses of respite amidst the vague unknowing in the time of Covid. I ventured to the mountains of North Carolina as summer ended in 2020 to find a reprieve in shinrin-yoku, as the Japanese call forest bathing – seeking serenity and balance as practised by a multitude of cultures for thousands of years. A quiet pilgrimage among the trees revealed the beloved fog that comforted me as a child growing up in the South. Embraced in a vapour evocative of the melancholy light of dusk, it was as though the clouds sighed an amorphous, dewy veil over the lush woods. I felt outside of time as we drove along the winding road, photographing through the windows and myriad layers of love and loss. Moving…

The subconscious and the realm of dreams have always fascinated me. In times of crisis and uncertainty, at the height of emotional burnout, I always find myself escaping from a dreary reality allowing my mind to wander fearlessly and freely into the unknown, the realm of the imaginary where everything is and isn’t simultaneously. Chrysalis comes from a place of helplessness as a sort of parallel world that shows a surge of tensions between opposite forces that awaken the subconscious desire to escape, to vanish into one’s own world away from reality as a means of self-preservation, healing and transformation. This work is about letting our imagination run free about experiencing the intangible. About being and non-being, the conscious and sub-conscious states of the human mind, about memory and illusion,…

For Now it’s day, but I am dreaming, I freely used negatives from holiday pictures and slides from my parents’ collection. The basis for this work is thus built on personal memories and experiences I had as a young boy. They are fragmented impressions of travels, often to the south of Europe. Assumably these images will also evoke in the viewer echoes from the past, of discoloured holiday snaps and old family albums covered in dust. This effect is intensified by combining my own images with snippets from nostalgic postcards. I often work with analogue techniques and develop my pictures in the darkroom for my collages. I like to work with materials such as handmade Japanese papers and weathered or yellowed papers I find in vintage stocks. In this way,…