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.
From “Scotland”
Visit artist's site: mattiasamnas.com
Posted June 28th, 2017
