The aim of my landscape photographs is to combine two
ostensibly incompatible modes of perception of nature
with one another: namely the perspectives of the painter
and the scientist.
The classical landscape painter is interested in the
picture as a whole. He engages contours, forms, and
colors, in search of balance and a successful
composition. When seeing a dune, for instance, he
perceives its harmoniously curved forms and the play of
light and shadow when the sun is low on the horizon. Were
someone to hand him a camera, he would shoot images that
capture the beauty, power or evanescence of what is
seen.
The natural scientist's interest is focused much
more upon detail. He is preoccupied with causality,
determinism, and natural forces and their interaction
with one another. In seeking to explain why things are
the way they are, he strives to trace natural phenomena
back to the laws governing them. Were we to lead him to
the selfsame dune, he would examine a single grain of
sand and would attribute the dune's form, the angle
of its slope, and the continual changes in shape caused
by the wind to the physical properties of the grain.
Through a camera lens he would concentrate on structures,
patterns, and surface qualities by dint of close-up
shots, which would then in turn bear witness to the play
of natural forces and their formative effect on animate
and inanimate nature; and, by doing this, the scientist
would render the reasons for the qualities and
constitution of the natural world visible.
The use of large format cameras as well as a complex
process of enlargement-production allows me to capture
both modes of perception of nature in one and the same
picture. My aim are photographs that evince two very
distinct, and yet inseparably interwoven, levels: an
aesthetic level (the effect of nature on the viewer) and
a purely analytic level (the effect of formative forces
on nature). As these levels are often located on very
different scales of magnitude, an extremely high optical
resolution is required for the fusion of both in one
picture. In most cases, the 4 x 5" shot format is not
sufficiently true to detail; thus, I predominantly use 5
x 7" or 5 x 13" cameras for my work. For the same
reasons, I prefer a final enlargement format of 30 x 40",
at the least. The use of "Cibachrome" photo paper and
the face-mounting of the enlargements behind glass or
Plexiglas lend the photographs a maximum brilliance that
further underscores the images' extreme richness in
detail. Thanks to the fine-tuning of a great number of
technical parameters I have arrived at over years of work
my pictures succeed in providing a synthesis of the two
complementary world views outlined above: the painter's
and the scientist's perspective.