Where the Mountains Have No Name / Nepal / 2011-2012 / Joel Tettamanti

So this guy just travels the world and takes photos of places. What a rough life!

psychodiagnostik:

Prix Pictet-winning series Yangtze, The Long River by Nadav Kander

Artist statement

Yangtze, The Long River 

The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100miles (6500km) across china, travelling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even for those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a significant role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people.

More people live along its banks than live in the USA, one in every eighteen people on the planet.

Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, I have photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source.

Importantly for me I worked intuitively, trying not to be influenced by what I already knew about the country. I wanted to respond to what I found and felt and to seek out the iconography that allowed me to frame views that make the images unique to me.

After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was responding to and how I felt whilst being in china was permeating into my pictures; a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself. China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past in the wake of the sheer force of its moving “forward” at such an astounding and unnatural pace. A people scarring their country and a country scarring its people.

I felt a complete outsider and explained this pictorially by “stepping back” and showing humans dwarfed by their surroundings. Common man has little say in China’s progression and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work.

Although it was never my intention to make documentary pictures, the
sociological context of this project is very important and ever present. The displacement of 3 million people in a 600km stretch of the River and the effect on humanity when a country moves towards the future at pace are themes that will inevitably be present within the work.

A Chinese man who I became friends with whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: “ Why do we have to destroy to develop?” He explained how in Britain many of us could revisit the place of our childhood, knowing that it will be much the same, it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible, the scale of development has left most places unrecognisable, “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”

China’s landscape both economically and physically is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again.

kateoplis:

Cosmonaut Fedor Yurchikhin

Amazing. Incredible to see how small things look from way up there.

Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord by Latz + Partner

Landscape Architecture: Latz + Partner
Team Members: Latz + Partner, Latz-Riehl, G. Lipkowsky
Location: Duisburg, Germany
Design year: 1990
Year of construction: 1992 – 2002
Area: 230 hectares
Budget: 15.500.000 EUR

With some 100 projects, the International Building Exhibition Emscher Park (IBA) in the Ruhr District was attempting to set quality building and planning standards for the environmental, economic and social transformation of an old industrialised region. The landscape park Duisburg Nord is one of these projects: The existing patterns and fragments formed by industrial use were taken, developed and re – interpreted with a new syntax, existing fragments were interlaced into a new ”landscape”.

The Piazza Metallica is the symbol of this park, a metamorphosis of the existing hard and rugged industrial structure into a public park.
Iron plates that were once used to cover casting moulds in the pig-iron casting works, form today the heart of the park. From the first moments of their existence, these cast iron plates have been eroded by natural physical processes. In this new place, they will continue to rust and erode.

It was a controversy to create places and public spaces in midst of a blast furnace plant. Today, the fear of pollution and contamination has given way to a calm acknowledgement of the old structures. During festivities up to 50.000 people gather in these places where the flowering trees interweave with the bizarre framework of the blast furnaces and the windheaters to a fantastic image.

So, by degrees, a fresh history and a fresh understanding of the contaminated site and of the landscape art have been developing…

This is the coolest park I’ve ever seen. Every time I pass a huge, old abandoned industrial complex all I want to do is go inside and explore. Now we can!

(more photos of the other areas of the park / via Landezine)