Lakeshore Operations | Fall Series #09

Things often look different when viewed from a distance. Considered from quite far away, things look very special. This is shown by photographer Stefan Kuhn in his LAKESHORE OPERATIONS series. From a bird's eye view and from different positions and flight altitudes, he has photographed shoreline landscapes. Kuhn then groups the individual images into works consisting of several panels. The result is landscapes that, despite their restrained post-processing, oscillate between representationalism and abstraction. The viewer knows what he is seeing. Often, however, he hardly recognizes it. Trees, bushes, meadows, riparian grass, shorelines, water, ice surfaces, fog, light and shadow - this is how it looks from above, from this initially irritatingly strange perspective. Mostly still identifiable in principle and viewed from a height, yet more and more stripped of its own essentiality. The shorelines increasingly dissolve into surfaces, lines, patterns. The nature abstracts itself and reveals itself in the variety of colors of the riparian vegetation, in the thousands of shades and reflections on the surface of the water, in the breaks and layers of the ice sheets on the lakes. By grouping individual pictures, Stefan Kuhn emphasizes the objectivity of landscapes here, and sometimes their dematerialisation. It is above all nature itself that makes itself visible or even invisible to the viewer as such. The artist expressly emphasizes that he doesn´t add anything to the photographs, nor does he remove anything. However, he increases the visual effect by carefully influencing the hue and brightness levels, by relating the individual exposures to each other in a process of reordering. In this way, photographic sequences are created that allow the observer insight into widely unknown, at first confusingly unusual, but always exciting visual worlds.