London’s gallery Brancolini Grimaldi represents a broad range of international artists who share a groundbreaking and experimental approach to photography. By introducing a more conceptual context to photography, it aims to redefine the future of the medium and the way it is displayed and experienced.
At Paris Photo Los Angeles they present the works by Dan Holdsworth, Domingo Milella, Jackie Nickerson and Massimo Vitali.
Dan Holdsworth
At ParisPhoto LA is a selection from Holdsworth’s recent series Transmission: New Remote Earth Views. In this series, Holdsworth appropriates topographical data to document the ideologically and politically loaded spaces of the American West in an entirely new way. In his images of the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mount Shasta, Mount St. Helens and Salt Lake City (Park City), we see stark, uninterrupted terrains where meaning is made through what it is absent, as much as what is seen. What at first appears to be a pure white snowcapped
mountain is in fact a digitally rendered laser scan of the earth interpreted from United States Geographical Survey data, a ‘terrain model’ used to measure climate and land change to measure man’s effect on the earth.
Domingo Milella
Domingo Milella’s most recent work features images of important ancient sites in the Mediterranean, where remnants of power, culture, life and death are captured. Over the last ten years, Milella’s subjects have been cities and their borders, cemeteries and villages, caves and homes, tombs and hieroglyphs – in short, signs of man’s presence on earth. His interest lies in the overlap between civilization and nature and how landscape and architecture are invested
with individual and collective memory.
One of the images being shown at ParisPhoto LA shows the fallen ruins of the GrecoRoman theatre of Termessos standing at 1600m above sea level. It almost appears to be part of and contained by the Taurus mountains that surround them. The ruins have endured over two thousand years of elemental weathering, frozen in time on the day the city was abandoned.
Milella is interested in both the massive physical effort of creating a place at a time before machinery could share the burden of construction, as well as the uses the amphitheater has had through different times of history. Like other sites Milella has chosen to photograph, it encapsulates his enquiry into an identity which is simultaneously archaic and contemporary.
Jackie Nickerson
TERRAIN is a new collection of photographs made in eastern and southern Africa in 2012. In these images the focus is on labour and how the exertions of labour leave psychic and material traces on people and the environment. The project shows human labour in the most fundamental of ways – as bodily energy expended, as mind and muscle used to change the natural world. Working is what we do as humans. TERRAIN is about us in the landscape, how we change the world we inhabit at every moment of our being, and how, for better and for worse, the places that we make, in turn, change who we are.
At a time when environmental politics think too simplistically about the effect that humans have on nature, TERRAIN nudges us towards a deeper understanding of the lived spaces of human activity. Here, hands and plants, limbs and fabric, bodies and soil hold close to one another.
Visually, the easy sense that there is nature and that there is humanity, and that the two are separate, ceases to exist. In TERRAIN people are, in the fullest sense of that archaic adjective, ‘terrene’ of the earth.
Massimo Vitali
Vitali has become one of the most celebrated contemporary photographers worldwide, renowned for his large colour prints depicting the crowded beaches and shorelines of the Mediterranean Sea. Over the last 15 years, Vitali’s work has subtly shifted from crowds to sparsely populated landscapes, seemingly an attempt to understand how we can avoid colonising that which makes our environment meaningful and balanced, and an almost Romantic vision of the sublime power of nature.
