Joel Tettamanti
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American landscape photographers, such as Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams, documented the country's great national monuments to bring us face to face with a sense of the sublime. Contemporary landscape photographers have an altogether different relationship to the world, recording the planet not at its most naturally beautiful but at its most damaged. The ecologically conscious Canadian artist Edward Burtynsky documents man's appalling disregard for the earth in his photographs of global industrial landscapes - oilfields in California, polluted ship-breaking beaches in Bangladesh, the Three Gorges Dam in China - and for the last 30 years the Californian-based photographer Richard Misrach has been motivated by social and political concerns in his ongoing Desert Cantos series which records the peculiar environment of the Nevada desert, which is littered with abandoned military test sites.
This exhibition, which opens on 7 September, presents the work of eight contemporary photographers whose practice is also concerned with making a record of man's imprint on the landscape. As curator James Reid puts it: "I am interested in how young, emerging photographers approach our environment in the 21st century, and it seems to me their idea of 'landscape' is not a pastoral, bucolic one anymore but a constructed, illusive and at times even sinister one, where man's impact is always apparent.'
Joel Tettamanti's photographs taken in the extreme environments of Greenland and the Alps capture people's efforts to protect themselves from nature's relentlessly hostile elements. Simple homes perch precariously on the edge of snow-covered cliffs, land-bound equivalents of lighthouses glowing in the night. Tiny avalanche shelters cling to the forbidding Alpine mountain valleys which bear the scars of man's attempts to carve a way through the unforgiving terrain. Juliana Sohn photographs a natural stream in Chang Gye Chang in Seoul which was filled in nearly 50 years ago, only to be re-created last year - in a strange simulacrum, a man-made version of a 'natural' stream with pedestrian paths was built on the very same spot.
What emerges from this work is not the pure sublime that we know from the early pioneers of landscape photography, or the ecological warnings of Burtynsky. Instead these young photographers show that man's often damaging presence in the world is not only creating a new kind of landscape but a new sense of beauty.
'The New Landscape'
The Leonard Street Gallery
London EC2A 4 QS
Tel: +44 (0)207 033 9977
www.tlsg.co.uk
Leo Fabrizio
Juliana Sohn
Mathieu Bernard-Reymond
Christoph Morlinghaus
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