A Relaxed Ambience
Project 4 leaves for Scope NY tomorrow! On my pre-Art Fair day of relaxation I've decided to point out two photographers who I've been thinking a lot about lately.
Christina Seely and Michael Vahrenwald are both photographing the urban and suburban ambient light as it affects outlying areas.
Christina Seely, Metropolis 35°00'N135°45'E, C-Print
Seely's series, Lux, documents the artificial flow produced by major cities in the three brightest regions, as seen on a NASA map of the world at night. The awe-inspiring images immediately achieve an irony in the contrast and interplay between the superficial beauty of ambient light and the aggressive human dominance which it represents. But the photographs are layered in both their process and resulting image. Using a long exposure time, Seely sets up the shots so that they become surreal, fantastical landscapes, all while using actual data, not manipulated.
Using research from NASA and photography without fiction, Seely creates landscapes that seem to be existing scenes placed in an illusory context, while really these are existing scenes being viewed in a way which highlights a specific, and real, phenomenon. This ostensible displacement reflects the distance between our (humans') perceived, experienced, everyday reality and the reality of a larger perspective - the effect our everyday reality has on the physical world within which we humbly exist.
Interestingly, this project sparked the formation of the collective, Civil Twilight. This collective's concerns are with "issues surrounding the intersection of nature and culture." One of the collective's projects is the creation of Lunar-Resonant Streetlights which are streetlights that dim and brighten based on the brightness of the moon. Read more about it here.
Michael Vahrenwald, Bramble, Wal-Mart, Boonton NJ, C-print
Michael Vahrenwald documents pedestrian landscapes. He romanticizes the outlying spaces of newly constructed "big box" stores. The dark, empty expanses surpass the initial nostalgia for pure land that they trigger. The use of ambient light, here, phenomenologically elicits the human attraction to light. The ambient light here connotes the warm and comforting indication of civilization as it is contrasted with the cold expanse of land around it.
More than inciting sadness in the viewer over the lost land pictured, the images reflect the homogeneity of suburban commercial culture. Further, as (according to Victor Burgin in Looking at Photographs, 1977) images of photography are "inextricably caught up within the specificity of the social acts which intend that image and its meanings", the real sadness and romanticism to be found in these photographs is not in the contemplation of the land but of the lone artist wandering off behind Target in middle America at night.
