Like Miska Draskoczy’s work a couple of weeks ago, Mattias Amnäs’s photography had me thinking about my roots in photography. For my first project in a color photography class my sophomore year of college, I created pictures of “color boundaries,” spots that showed divisions in fields of color amongst the urban buildings in my new-to-me city. My images included a lot of fences, walls, telephone lines – and often funny sights in quirky Baltimore, not dissimilar from the geometric hedges and satellite dishes of Amnäs’s series, Scotland.

When Amnäs contacted me, he introduced his pictures from his trip “to the Scottish highlands, Glasgow and Edinburgh, were [he] documented the interaction of sheep, waste, nature and traffic cones.” Based on this text, I had to know more. Amnäs told me, “In early May, I went for a road tip in Scotland. It was my first trip to the UK and I brought my Pentax 6×7 from 1969 on my shoulder, along with 20 rolls of film. I was mesmerized by Scotland’s nature and architecture. Along the roads in Glasgow, you could see a city filled with quick fixes, buildings with facades that hadn’t been cleaned for decades, so much character. Along the roads in the Highlands, you could see all the litter of tourism, sheep everywhere, and the overwhelming usage of traffic cones. Something about it made it feel so surreal, almost like stepping in to a David Lynch film set.”

From the artist’s statement: I’m a graphic designer and photographer based in Stockholm, Sweden. I like exploring the visual languages of ar­chi­tec­ture, landscape and the interactions between people and their surroundings. I consider myself a documentary photographer rather then a conceptual series photographer. I don’t like to tell the viewer what the photograph is about, I want them to look at it and build their own story.

Visit artist's site: mattiasamnas.com

For college, I moved from my childhood home of suburban Colorado to Baltimore. It was a difficult transition from the wide open west, with natural areas to be easily accessed in every direction, to the center of a large east coast city, where I could only walk and take the light rail in attempt to interact with nature and animals anywhere I could. I adjusted by making photographs of my new surroundings, square, sans-people, and often of evidence of nature in the city. I thought about those pictures a lot while I was viewing Miska Draskoczy’s series Gowanus Wild. The photos are all made at night, the odd lighting and colors adding to the images’ bizarre subjects: a hanging plant mounted high on the brick wall of a parking lot; a huge tree surrounded by trash, graffiti, and glowing city lights.

From the artist’s statement: My vision for “Gowanus Wild” is to illustrate a personal exploration of nature and wilderness in the paradoxical setting of a contaminated industrial environment. As the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn has been declared a federal Superfund cleanup site and seen over 150 years of continuous industrial use, one of my aims with the series is to show just how tenacious nature can be in the face of such grave environmental destruction. Set entirely at night when the area empties of people and activity, the mood is one of stillness, reflection, and discovery.

I’ve lived on the border of Gowanus and Park Slope since 2008, and walking home through the deserted streets, I was always struck by how odd and atmospheric the place felt. At first I photographed the area because it inspired interesting images. Later I started to ask myself more consciously what it was that drew me to it. While an indictment of man’s abuse of the environment is perhaps inevitable, my goal is to not just celebrate nature’s resilience but to also show how it is paralleled by the human ability to seek and find the balm of nature in the most unlikely of places. I believe wilderness and adventure are natural longings and that satisfying these urges is perhaps less about far flung travel and more about altering our perception and awakening to our surroundings, however ugly or distraught they may be.

Gowanus Wild has been made into a book, which can be ordered here.

Visit artist's site: miskadraskoczy.com

Several years ago, when I was first starting to photograph in natural history museums, I was experimenting with abstracting taxidermy animals and focusing on the fields of color behind them in their display cases. It was within a year that I stumbled upon Grounded by Helen Sear – and promptly quit my project because I was so blown away by the pictures she had made in a similar vein. Grounded has always stuck with me, and I thought of it instantly when I saw some prints of new-to-me work by Lee Deigaard at the Living With Animals conference. I had featured Lee’s work a few years ago, and I was so excited when I learned she’d be at the conference. I love the photographs in her series Equuleus (“part of a multi-media long-term project, In Your Dreams [Horses], exploring horse personality and individuality, sensory processing and proprioception, concepts of invitation, initiation, and trespass, and shared thresholds of experience between horse and human”) for the same reasons I am drawn to Sear’s work – the playful concept; the surreal, otherworldly quality – but also for its thoughtful, poetic statement. Boundaries, the horizon, the symbolism of the horse’s back – knowing the meaning of these images to the artist makes me wholly appreciate this project.

From the artist’s statement:
Boundaries – between earth and sky, between species, between bodies in space also exist between incursion and permission, coercion and compliance, between inside and out. Boundaries define concepts of self and other and are often flexible and permeable.
The horizon – that place of possibility – when pursued as a destination always eludes us.
Horses, as they did throughout human history from the third millennium B.C. took us there. The horse’s back in these photographs embodies the horizon; his back carries his rider farther than the rider could walk alone.
Where bodies are in space, within the landscape, can define the parameters of a relationship from formal to intimate. To cross another’s boundaries i.e. to touch them, carries a charge – whether of transgression or connection depends on the context.
Human exploration, whether global or granular, invokes conquest.
The body is a landscape. One body in connection with another body is a relationship.
Human-equine relationships derive from ingrained predator-prey relationships, (im)balances of power (physical and otherwise), and concepts of dependence and interdependence, compliance and autonomy. These are foundational aspects to almost any interpersonal relationship. Knowing a horse is like being in any partnership. Touch, proximity, familiarity, request, response mediate how we interact in close quarters. Acts of grooming and riding are by definition intimate; they involve close contact, communicative touch (and being touched), and mutual cooperation.
Horses naturally attune themselves – to our heartbeats, rates of breathing, the movements of our pupils – they are sensitive to pheromones. The know the subtle language of the body. It is difficult to hide your true self from a horse. He reads you, perhaps better than you do yourself.
A horse – no matter how big or brave – thinks and reacts like a prey animal. He scans the horizon and takes the long view: the movements of sun and stars, the change of seasons, the grass as it grows. He can see very nearly in the round. He is alert to the landscape, his pupils, rectangular and horizontal, are geared towards the horizon and the approach of any distant predator. The feeling of close connection in an intimate relationship also carries a sense of deep strangeness and far places. To know and be known is a wide open frontier.

Visit artist's site: leedeigaard.com

Ask anyone who attended the Seeing With Animals portion of the Living With Animals conference in March, and they’ll likely tell you the most stand-out talk was Maria Lux’s “Eat, Drink, and Be Merry: Unforeseen Consequences of Co-existence with Vultures, Fruit Bats, and Viruses.” This project and all its components are so intentional, well researched and executed, fascinating conceptually, and mind-blowing visually. The work speaks of wealth, feasting, and prosperity alongside the inevitability of death, while featuring the intertwining stories of vultures, fruit bats and viruses. I learned so much during this 15-minute presentation, and I’m so glad to know about Maria’s vast range of incredible artwork. Be sure to check out her website for much more.

From the artist’s statement: I make installation-based works that center on the way animals are used to generate human knowledge and understanding. As both familiar and alien, animals often come to serve as the boundary against which humans create our own sense of identity – efforts which play out through both historical and urgently current concerns. Histories and philosophies of science, the optimism and fantasy that accompanies empirical study, animals at the borders of the human and the machine, technologies of domestication, and invasive species are recurring topics in my practice. I work across disciplines, building projects around existing research and stories from fields such as evolutionary biology, medicine, agriculture, history, literature, film, and anthropology. Conveying this variety of information entails using a variety of materials and processes. My work spans from traditional drawings and paintings, dioramas, and museum-style display cases, to large-scale carving, casting, or sewing. The installations sometimes leverage the conventions of natural history or science museums, and regularly use found and modified objects, quoted articles and texts, or graphs and charts. I place myself within a context of both art-worlds and scholarly discussions, and I see my work as part of a larger dialogue about the unique qualities of both animals and art-making that can lead us to new ways to think and new ways of knowing.

Visit artist's site: marialux.net

In a “Basic Photography” class my freshman year of college, I was given the assignment “types.” I photographed the back of the heads of all the important people in my life. I loved the assignment, my photos, and getting to see the all my peers’ photos in critique. Ever since, I’ve been drawn to images of types of things, visual catalogs of sights we see repeatedly in the world around us. Because David Kressler’s series Viewpoint also involves nature and how we experience it in a curated way, I of course fell in love with the photographs as soon as I saw them. I love the project’s sense of humor. The pictures ask “This is what you would see if you took that highway exit for the ‘scenic overlook’; is it as beautiful and picturesque as you’d hoped?”

From the artist’s statement: I have always been intrigued by the markers that read “viewpoint” and “scenic overlook” that I see when driving on the highway and what these types of places might impart. A typical arrangement: one first finds a parking lot, a map, and then a path to follow, leading to a clearing, and finally to a place to stand. One hopes to find a stunning vista, a connection to history and place. A life-size diorama of an ideal geography. However, just as often, there is uncertainty. Something missed. A landscape with suggested significance and yet it’s like a stage set, whose performance has yet to happen, or already has.

Who chooses these prescribed points of view? How and why are they chosen? These choices are somewhat analogous to how a photographer decides what to include and exclude in a photograph. Is the viewpoint a narrative or a fact?

I began photographing viewpoints to try and understand and make sense of them. To study the customs, to step back and see the entire structure. As I did, I increasingly became aware of the other side. The subject of the viewpoint. I wanted to go to the other side, the “wrong” side. To be outside the system. To enter the view. In many cases, it’s not possible as a human with your feet on the ground to move into the scene. An invisible wall suggests you keep out. Maybe a railing stands in the way, or a chasm. But as I was able, I did, and I looked back. The observed looking back at the observer as it were. Maybe this desire came from a longing as a photographer to not just be an observer but to be a participant, looking to find something greater in meaning, than even the hopes of a viewpoint.

Visit artist's site: davidkressler.com

Found via: Lenscratch