At this year’s edition of Paris Photo Christophe Guye Galerie presents a selection of its most prominent artists who, in different approaches and with unique techniques, prove to have very distinct and unique visions within the genre of landscape photography. We will exhibit artists such as Jun Ahn, Stéphane Couturier, Rinko Kawauchi, Seba Kurtis, Erik Madigan Heck, Jules Spinatsch, Risaku Suzuki, Dominique Teufen and Albert Watson, that would normally fall into a variety of photographic genres. From conceptual approaches to colorful photographic constructions, from the questioning of the medium, both on a pictorial and on a material level, to purely abstract interpretations, they all developed an artistic approach, that looks beyond the traditional boundaries of landscape photography and raises fundamental questions about nature and its representation.
At the point when nature, itself value-free and indifferent, has value attributed to it by human beings and starts to become part of our experience, perception and history, it becomes a thing of cultural significance. Nature has become more than anything an idea and therefore culture – everything has become landscape, little bits of tolerated, conserved and controlled naturalness, which completely determine the way we imagine the natural world.
Additionally, in a time in which everyone can and does record the landscape, its appearance is becoming increasingly generic and engraved in our memories. Thus, the way in which artists are working with representations of nature becomes much more forceful, in the sense of more accurate and perhaps more relevant. The different works that will be exhibited, reflect on how a particular set of pictorial conditions leads to a given understanding of what is being seen - some achieve it by challenging our habitual way of seeing and others by inducing precisely these expected associations simply to mislead us.
With our booth we investigate the way in which our natural environment is depicted at the start of a new millennium. Human influence is visible everywhere, leading to relevant questions about the future of the earth as well as questions about the meaning and power of precisely these depicted representations. The works on show also reflect on the distinction between the natural and the artificial and at the same time offer both visual beauty and a display of photographic ingenuity. Thus, for the artists, landscape photography becomes a vehicle for their thoughts on place, history, time and space – all fundamental issues related to human nature.
