A Short History

As an artist I use historical photographic analog technologies. My work explores landscape, particularly in remote areas of the world, and focused on my passion for exceptional trees and natural formations.

I use a nineteenth-century portable field plate camera to make large-scale, cinematic photos. In a contemporary way, my photographs reflect the nineteenth-century romantic landscape paintings.

However, my analog photography and the resulting analog and digital photo prints are not nostalgic retrospectives. I am someone who searches, discovers and explores the landscape on foot. Capturing specific incidence of light and a deviating perspective makes the work more than purely documentary. Thus arises in my work a metamorphosis of the captured image.

At the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, Switzerland, I first used a camera obscura, a self-built pinhole camera. During my postgraduate study at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, I made working with the pinhole camera into my primary work. I re-created my photographic prints of silver gelatin using historical chemical recipes. Transforming them from large-format black and white pinhole photographs to monochromatic color images, like in the series Carousel.

While teaching in Chongqing, China in 2005, I deepened the vision of my own work with the series, Bamboo Sea. Even though I was witness to a changing and dynamic modern China, I sought out the landscapes that I recognized from classical Chinese paintings. Traditional Chinese landscape painting emphasizes the ‘greatness’ of nature over man. In most Chinese paintings, nature and its forces dwarf man. By producing my largest work-to-date, 240 x 400 cm, I intended to re-create this physical and emotional response through scale and a near-immersive experience into the image.

In the past twenty years, I have developed a very personal interpretation of the landscape by experimenting with analog color negative film. By using reflection and absorption of light, and long exposure times, I influence the dyes in the film, creating a painterly language within the medium itself. I physically reverse the analog film in my camera. In fact, I shoot through the material of the film itself. The result is a partially or fully complementary color registration in the film. Somewhere between chance and practice, I have mastered this skill to create a iconographic language of landscape; beginning from the series, Confronting the Sublime.

The starting point of the photo series, Confronting the Sublime: the CDF Project, was my interest in the work of the nineteenth-century painter, Casper David Friedrich. To have a contextual association between his work and the dramatic landscapes that inspired him, I travelled to Rügen, Germany. Landscape as a subject spoke of the Romantic in the time of Friedrich, a transcendental understanding of nature. But in our time, landscape has become a central theme in contemporary activism, with urgent issues such as accelerated erosion and climate change demanding attention.

The project American Sublime, started in October 2019 in the USA. American road trips are often portrayed as journeys of self-discovery and exploration, echoing the pioneering spirit of the country’s frontier past. However, this narrative can overshadow the realities of modern road travel. The glorification of the open road can sometimes overlook the environmental impacts, and the historical displacement and dispossession of indigenous lands and cultures. It’s essential to approach the idea of road trips with a nuanced understanding that acknowledges both the allure and challenges associated with them. Prepared with this practical understanding, as an American living abroad for more than 30 years, I hoped I could add another “perspective” to the experiences of those known landscapes. Experiencing the grandeur of these landscapes for the first time myself, I wanted to bring new insights and context within my own personal view of landscape. I photographed the idyllic American Southwest landscapes on large-format color negative analog film. Although I had a clear plan of the pre-selected locations, during my search through the landscape, I listened to what a place communicated to me. The series not only shows a landscape of grand proportions but also hints at underlying issues of water, land and rights of those who live within these special landscapes through their artwork titles. I returned for further photographic journeys in 2022 and 2024, after which the project became: American Sublime, it’s not what it seems.

My passion for photography continues. My work insists on the origin of photography and its materials. I am dedicated to explore, expand and deepen photography as an art form.