Honest Landscapes

Although I work exclusively with a camera I have an ambivalent relationship with the photographic medium, probably because my language – my imagery - and my work processes don’t fit comfortably within the classic territory of photography. Thus a big part of my practice explores photography itself. Here I look at landscape as paradigm; from a visual angle by offering typical examples or patterns, and also semantically referring to the horizontal orientation of the images. All the images come from my own archives, including my personal albums, thus most have been taken with either a point and shoot camera or a mobile phone. The original images are reworked, printed with our faulty home printer (which distorts colours), manually crumpled, re-photographed in the studio with my work camera, and finally edited again. In the end, these works are not really photographs of landscapes, but of manually crumpled printed images. The crumpling and the degree of distortion and blurriness show my complete honesty towards the viewer in that they are not looking at pictures of reality, but mere (poetic?) representations of it. And yet, once over wondering about how they might have been done from a technical point of view, the viewer will read them as landscapes, trying to figure out where those places are, where the images might have been taken… This is because making sense is intrinsically wired into our human psyche and explains the way visual information is received and processed by people in all walks of life, including how we are affected by news and the media… Which ties in with my recurrent interest in the fact that reality does not exist as a fixed concept, and that, in any case, photography can mislead probably more than it can tell the truth…