Jorge Juan Anhalzer sees himself as a self-taught adventurer, captivated by photography. As a young man, he climbed the Andes mountain, bearing witness to their beauty through photography. Although the images were fine black-and-white film photographs, they were fragmented, and Anhalzer felt frustrated by his inability to capture the landscape in its entirety
He used an ultralight aircraft, which he built himself, and a digital camera, to become the most important Ecuadorian, and perhaps South American, landscape and aerial photographer.
Among his different series of landscapes, Abstracciones takes an almost pictorial approach. The hundred photographs, shot from the clouds, are absolutely stunning. According to the principle of “cenital photography,” his sweeping views, mostly perpendicular and overhead, offer a vision of the whole. Anhalzer then makes a selection, cutting them into figurative but constructed tableaux, as if they were paintings.
With dynamic shapes and lines, rich textures and misleading reflections, bodies of diaphanous water, patterns and perfectly colored harmonies, creations of man and nature, the set creates an unidentifiable but flawless and happy image in the composition. It’s impossible to know that what we see is a rice plantation where some of the fields are cultivated and others burned. The most astonishing of all is perhaps a palette of burnt desert colors, with a fissured marshland terrain and two types of strongly contrasting shells. There’s a kind of magnetism to the photograph: the eye is drawn to it, but when we learn that it’s one of the biggest, most polluted dumps in the city of Quito, the attraction is broken. The acids and waste products form large, thick layers which, seen from above, are reminiscent of the texture of sand , paradoxically, disgust us, especially when one imagines what it must smell like.
The photos of the salt marshes colored by bacteria and algae are like abstract tapestries with pigmented nuances which blend into the backwater and ponds. Unretouched, the entire series, through framing and the photographer’s choices, creates a powerful sensation of dizziness, allowing us to imagine nature in a different way. These abstract landscapes were perhaps fleeting, but they have been captured by the photographer.
BOOK
Abstracciones (Abstractions)
Photographs byr Jorge Juan Anhalzer
Editions Imprenta Mariscal
Pages: 135
Format: 35 x 23 cm
Language: English – Spanish
27€
Jorge Anhalzer: www.jorgeanhalzer.com
