The Enigmatic Landscape

The Enigmatic Landscape

The Enigmatic Landscape Corporate & Museum Frame, Inc. 301 West Broad Street, Richmond, VA 23220 Phone: 804.643.6858 hours: 10 5, Monday Friday Opening Reception: Oct 7, 2005 7 10 PM Photographs by: Jens Knigge (Germany), Harald Leban (Austria), Tony McLean (England), Carl Weese (United States), Witho Worms (Netherlands) Why enigmatic? Photographs are factual, documentary, worth a thousand words aren t they? A photograph can tell us a lot about how some thing or some place looked at a certain moment. A photograph can depict what happened in a split second, or during several minutes. But in real life we see the world in motion, with the depth perception of binocular vision, and in color. So photographs are far from complete or accurate reproductions of reality. This would be a drawback if the pictures were expected to be purely informational but it s really one of photography s great virtues. Just as a story needn t have a moral to be good fiction, photographs don t need clear or unambiguous meanings to be good visual art. In all of these pictures, the meaning is up to you, the viewer, to determine for yourself. These five photographers all choose to work with large format cameras and to print in traditional or alternative processes, most frequently platinum/palladium. But a preference for cameras that look like antiques (some of them are antiques) and the use of printing processes dating back to the 19th century should not be confused with any tendency toward nostalgic sentimentality or a desire to make old-fashioned pictures. Big pieces of film make richer, smoother negatives with more subtle tone and detail than smaller films. Platinum/palladium prints present these virtues in a way that has never been equaled, let alone surpassed, by more recently devised chemical or digital processes. These methods continue to represent the cutting-edge.

When Joseph Johnson asked me to curate a show at Corporate and Museum Frame s gallery, to include my work with that of several other photographers of my choosing, I agreed immediately. Then I had to deal with the issue of selecting the other photographers. To my surprise, this took only a couple of minutes. Before I d formed an idea of what sort of show I wanted to put together, the work of four colleagues came immediately to mind. Once that happened, the theme of the show was clear, or rather, enigmatic. These artists, all of whom happen to live and work in Europe, are not interested in using a camera to record the obvious. Their pictures ask more questions than they answer, which is a good thing. Witho Worms explores the lands Holland has reclaimed from the sea. He imposes a formal rule of a centered horizon, giving equal space to land (just recently sea) and sky. He uses a 12x20 inch camera to record every nuance of detail and tone in the view he presents. His prints use his own idiosyncratic approach to the POP (Printing Out Process) methods of platinum/palladium printing. The prints introduce split color and tone effects that do not, in fact, have a literal connection to the subjects, but that is exactly what makes the prints so interesting. Jens Knigge finds landscapes in human constructions. He chooses viewpoints that give you only a little information about the subject. What he leaves out is as important to the pictures as what he includes. Tony McLean photographs landscape in the British Isles and then makes negatives that he can print in a variety of processes that alter what was seen into what might be. His Chrysotypes (gold prints) introduce color splits even more extreme than you see in Witho s prints. Harald Leban turns his impressions of European landscape into subtle and luminous platinum/palladium prints. Look for the element of time rendered visible, sometimes by recording the movement of water, or the momentary effect of passing clouds. My prints come from explorations of the eastern United States landscape. For some reason, photographers tend to photograph the American west. I prefer to make pictures of the richer forests, and smaller mountains, of the more densely populated east. Carl Weese Woodbury, Ct, 2005

Witho Worms The most important subject in my work is the way man shapes his world. I concentrate on subjects where I can find crossovers and connections between nature and culture. The Dutch polders are a good example of such a crossover. These landscapes are man-made nature. Although I avoid photographing direct references to mankind in my landscapes, its presence is still visible in the arrangement of the natural elements. Patterns, planes and lines structure my photographs. For each project I try to find a form that will lead me into my subject. For this series of polder landscapes I combined the notions of tangent planes and viewpoint with formal placement of the horizon in all of these photographs. The use of the 12x20 format and printing in platinum is for me the way to show respect for my subject, taking the greatest care to reveal its soul. Witho Worms, born 25-06-1959, Amersfoort, Holland. Educated as a visual anthropologist and artist.

Jens Knigge Born in 1964, Jens Knigge grew up in Jena, East Germany, the City of Carl-Zeiss-Lenses. After study of engineering he moved to Berlin and began his photographic work in the early 1990 s with portraits of jazz musicians. Beginning in 1995, his contracts for architectural photography increasingly influenced his personal artwork. At the same time he began to learn the platinum printing process from his teacher, the German master printer Wolfgang Moersch. Since that time, Knigge has been obsessed with this process and uses no other materials for his own projects. Knigge s photography has been shown in several solo exhibitions at the Carl-Zeiss-Foundation in Jena, Germany; the Kunstallianz-Project, Berlin, Germany; the Josef-Sudek-Atelier Prague, Czech Republic; and other gallerys in Germany and the United Kingdom. His work is in the permanent collections of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, and Kunstallianz, Berlin, as well as private collections.

Tony McLean Making any photograph is an amazing process hard to understand or really describe. It simply happens. There are lots techniques to learn, lots of processes to figure out, and lots of studies to be made, but in the end it is a culmination of more than all those things. It comes from inside and it will not stand much shaping all the studies and learned skills only help me to give it a voice that is recognizable by others. My fascination with the alternative processes platinum and gold and the use of a large format camera began about ten years ago. Before that I spent far too much time in the darkroom. Initially, learning the necessary basic craft skills and then experimenting with the more obscure techniques. Looking back, I guess that I was searching for something that would blend the abstract nature of monochrome printing with excitement of being responsible for the whole process. If photography is as was once described, just a way of making an expensive mark on a piece of paper, then printing using precious metals must be considered as absurdly opulent. However, it s is peculiar how quickly I forgot about the valuable constituents of a process and began to focus on the depth and subtlety of the developed image. I shall continue to strive to capture a little bit of the enduring beauty of nature and present the results in the most fitting and visually unique way. Tony McLean England 2005

Harald Leban I was born 1967 in Kittsee, Austria, where I grew up in harmony with my rural environment. Very early I discovered the medium of photography at first only for the purpose of documenting my environment later to express my own way of observing it. My purpose is to show both nature and man-made things in their quiet, and so often overlooked, eloquence: to expose small, seemingly unimportant details and make them visible to others. I work with large format cameras and alternative printing processes (Platinum/Palladium, Carbon) as well as with contemporary digital image reproduction (inkjet printing). My work has been collected by galleries and individuals. From time to time I teach workshops on the Alternative Processes. I m a biochemical engineer by profession and work in the field of water-and wastewater treatment in Hainburg/Austria, where I live with my family.

Carl Weese Around 1960, at age eleven, I was captivated by photography and began to develop and print pictures in the family darkroom. After majoring in English at college and spending more time on photography than academic studies, in 1972 I began working as a freelance photographer and writer. At the same time I began a series of personal photographic projects, spending more time on them than on paying assignments. That pattern continues to the present. In recent years my work has centered on landscapes that reflect the impact of human activity. Sometimes this is obvious, as in pictures of agricultural areas, while sometimes it is subtle, as in pictures made in parks and forest reserves that look wild and natural but would not be there at all without the human intervention of preservation.