Posted by Fabio 3 October 2016
Photographs are all we know. As Susan Sontag said in 1973, humankind still lingers in Plato’s cave, and trusts in images as a representation of truth. Through a proliferation of imagery, we believe that we can see the whole world — to see a photograph is to know reality. And it is this visual language that has shaped our aesthetic and perceptual understanding of the landscape as natural, inland scenery. Within a society mediated by imagery, our perception of the landscape is influenced by traditional photographs. But photography is capable of presenting more than a single moment of time from a single vantage point; it has an enduring capacity to give form to new experience.
It is this thesis that drives my investigation of the landscape. This series acts as an evaluation of representation of the landscape as a means to revive the aura of place. By focusing on light, time, and chemical and digital interactions, these images explore integral features of photography in order to reveal new ways of experiencing the visual, material, and ephemeral aspects of environment. To achieve this, I collaborate with each environment using natural elements to produce views that are outside of our limited, visual perception and only made visual through the inherences of photographic recording processes. _Kyra Schmidt