“Umhverfing is an Icelandic word for the state between nature and environment” says Pétur Thomsen of his project titled Umhverfing. There is clearly no equivalent word in English but the concept itself is intriguing. Icelandic photographer Thomsen has spent the last several years documenting the transformation of undeveloped areas around Reykjavic into suburban developments. He [...]
Archive of posts filed under the Photography category.
Animal Mysticism – Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow
The images in Gregory Colbert’s Ashes and Snow remind us that animals have always had a mystical place in the world of humans. Started in 1992, Ashes and Snow is a long term project in which photographer and film-maker Gregory Colbert works towards “rediscovering the common ground that once existed when people lived in harmony [...]
Naked With Pigs – Miru Kim
“These industrial environments are so desensitizing in that you, even if you are an animal lover, become complaisantly accepting of the fact that the live beings are only raw materials for mass commodity production. This needs some serious questioning.” These are some of the thoughts of New York Based artist Miru Kim in relation to [...]
Simple or Simplistic – The Works of Sanna Kannisto
I recently visited an exhibition of the work of Sanna Kannisto and bought the recently published book about her work. The work of this young Finnish artist is fascinating. It questions how, in order to understand and describe, science has to simplify and can never hope to capture the true complexity of life. The body [...]
What’s Your Fetish – People or Nature? Works by John Stezaker
I came across the work of John Stezaker in the latest issue of Ag Magazine. Photographer, writer and critic Gerry Badger writes a review of an exhibit of Stezaker’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery. Of the images that you see here (from the series “Mask”), Badger says “By sticking a postcard over a face, and [...]
Robin Schwartz – Amelia and her Animals
Robin Schwartz is a friend. But that’s not why her work is on this blog. It is here because, for many months, I have been looking for work that describes a positive relationship between us and the non-human rather than the ubiquitous work that castigates ad nauseam the damage we are doing to our environment. [...]
Taryn Simon and Smuggled Goods
The dead bird above was labeled as “home decoration”. Photographer Taryn Simon spent 5 days at JFK Airport in New York photographing goods seized by the US postal service and the US Customs and Border Protection. She compiled over 1000 images for her series “Contraband”. Rare and threatened animal species protected through CITES – the [...]
Gisele Bundchen – Naked for the Earth
Let’s face it. The above image of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen wearing a dress made out of water is more likely to draw attention to the vital importance of water to our lives than yet another picture of a polluted river or another attempt at heart rending with a child in Africa standing by a [...]
Reality in Abstraction – The Images of David Maisel
David Maisel’s work spans many different project over many years. One of his interests is in documenting through aerial photographs the impact that Man has on the landscape. The image above is from “The Mining Project” where he explores the effect of mining in “undoing of the landscape, in terms of both its formal beauty [...]
