Nathalie Grenzhauser
Trespassing
30 Sep - 10 Oct 2010
The photographer, Nathalie Grenzhaeuser, creates contemporary landscape images. The arctic area of Spitzbergen and the Australian Outback are the destinations of her research travels, her subjects are remote natural spaces in contrast to extensive industrial usage. Her themes are those of alterations in these landscapes in relation to climate change, globalised markets, military usage and social connections. The images owe a lot to Nathalie Grenzhaeuser's courage in entering forbidden terrain, deliberately ignoring 'No Trespassing' signs and thereby opening up hidden views.
Nathalie Grenzhaeuser takes analogue photographs that are then reworked digitally. She uses the tension between 'documentary' shots that arise from often dangerous and exhausting journeys, and digital reworking to stage places and landscapes. Magnificent landscape photos ensue that equally quote examples from both art and recent film histories and thus place cultural memories such as horizons of desire and scenes of angst in the image.
The seductive style of the photographs admittedly leads one to speculate on a digital reworking, yet her techniques of staging first become clearer on a much closer viewing. In this way her photographic works constitute real and hidden places simultaneously. Grenzhaeuser overlays her landscapes with an amalgam of pathos, light irony and mystification that repeatedly plays with the uncanny, the imaginative, and thus produces a relevance beyond routine documentary activities.
Nathalie Grenzhaeuser takes analogue photographs that are then reworked digitally. She uses the tension between 'documentary' shots that arise from often dangerous and exhausting journeys, and digital reworking to stage places and landscapes. Magnificent landscape photos ensue that equally quote examples from both art and recent film histories and thus place cultural memories such as horizons of desire and scenes of angst in the image.
The seductive style of the photographs admittedly leads one to speculate on a digital reworking, yet her techniques of staging first become clearer on a much closer viewing. In this way her photographic works constitute real and hidden places simultaneously. Grenzhaeuser overlays her landscapes with an amalgam of pathos, light irony and mystification that repeatedly plays with the uncanny, the imaginative, and thus produces a relevance beyond routine documentary activities.