Inka Lindergård & Niclas Holmström

The changing of seasons always has me thinking about how we (humans? Americans?) run out to look at and photograph nature, the turning leaves or the first snow, almost the same way we go to church only on Christmas. Many people go on vacations to stand before canyons and monuments and take in enormous sights for a few moments, arguably not really experiencing them or doing so less they remove themselves further via binoculars or a camera lens. I am interested in this culture in which people experience things by snapping photos on their cameras or phones. To me, this is more like remote observation than interaction.

I’m a big fan of Thomas Struth’s Museum Photographs, pictures of people looking at paintings that critique the way gallery-goers view artworks down to what they wear and the way they stand. In both this series and Inka Lindergård & Niclas Holmström’s Watching Humans Watching (and when I am in a museum or at a zoo), I am intrigued by the arrangement we make as a group of strangers standing before the same thing. In Watching Humans Watching, the formation of humans mimics or complements the landscape they view. I think this is fantastic.

From Time LightBox: …The Stockholm-based duo spent the last four years capturing the dynamic between humans and nature by taking an objective approach to their subjects, much like the way landscape photographers document wild animals. Lindergård and Holmström had no interaction with the people they photographed. Each picture explores man’s disconnected relationship with nature, as if there were a wall between them and the environment. The images show people standing back, distant from the land, with some viewing nature through binoculars.