From: shannon stoney (sstoney@pdq.net)
Date: 09/04/02-06:21:14 AM Z
On the subject of "pushing the envelope" in landscape photography:
I saw a great show yesterday. Actually I helped to hang it at the
Fotofest headquarters in Houston. IT was photographs by Simon
Norfolk, a British photographer, and the subject was Afghanistan.
The photographs were huge inkjet prints, 44x55. They were the best
inkjet prints I had ever seen, really sharp. I don't know yet if he
shot them as 4x5 or 8x10 negatives, but they enlarged beautifully.
Mr Norfolk specified that we should simply tack these huge pieces of
paper to the wall, which we did.
Anyway, these were "landscapes" and they were absolutely gorgeous,
but not in the way Ansel Adams's landscapes, for example, are
beautiful. The images are mostly of Kabul and its surroundings, and
they show bombed out buildings, piles of spent shells, wrecked
busses, and the like. The light is beautiful, but the subject of the
images is quite disturbing and sad. The devastation is not just from
our bombing of Kabul, but from two decades of war with the Russians
and from civil war.
Seeing this show expanded my idea of what landscape photography can
be. These images were so far from being boring or old fashioned that
they refute any idea that landscape photography is somehow "over."
--shannon
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