[caption id="attachment_4610" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Interstate House (Summer), 2009, 20 x 24 inches."][/caption]
On Wildlife Analysis by Bryan Graf
By Photography Expert, amani olu
Contemporary landscape photography is often concerned with form, representation, and advancing notions of romanticism in what is primarily large–scale, color photographs. This methodology has been in vogue since William Jenkins curated New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape in 1975. Over 30–years later, the work in Jenkins’ exhibition continues to influence photographic practice, providing a solid foundation for seeing and considering new positions in landscape photography. A strong interest in the latter is at the center of Wildlife Analysis, a series of landscapes by Bryan Graf currently on view at Wild Project.
Graf photographs inconsequential areas in and around highway median strips, small swamp patches, and wooded sections near industrial parks in New Jersey. These landscapes go largely unnoticed, especially by daily commuters who drive past them at high speeds. From a real estate perspective, these locations have no value and are too small to warrant any form of residential or commercial development, hence, allowing the persistence of the natural order to unfold. White Tail Deer roam free in the thicket of tall grass, Monarch Butterflies fly around in the sky, houses sit abandoned, roads go unpaved, dandelions flourish in isolation, and trees grow haphazardly.
[caption id="attachment_4611" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Butterfly 1, 2009, 20 x 24 inches."][/caption]
Using the aforementioned locations as a starting point, Graf re-visits these areas on several occasions to record the texture of the environment and to perfect a non–judgmental, non–representational style that is typically associated with this variety of landscape photography. To further question photographic norms, Graf photographs these spaces with black–and–white film, and later adds an additional layer of fogged color film when he prints the image in the darkroom. This process permits Graf to define a color palette similar to the mood of these environments, serving as a metaphor for the landscape itself.
On the surface, the subject might appear to focus on how nature exists and adapts around development, yet this is simply a backdrop to the prominent issue, which is how Graf tinkers with the possibilities of combining monochromatic and color images, and darkroom printing techniques to resolve how these landscapes function in nature. When Graf began making this work, he did not have a clear project in mind. Graf admits, “I really just wanted to make pictures I hadn’t made before.” The absence of intentionality, photographing repetitiously, chance, experimentation, and instinct inform his work, and leave the viewer with an abstracted landscape that is at once eerie, isolated and uncultivated.
Wildlife Analysis rejects conventional beauty, scale, and transparency in contemporary landscape photography, adhering to a post camera, process oriented practice. This is where Graf successfully builds on the tradition of landscape photography, and pushes the limits of photographic seeing. Instead of relying solely on the camera, Graf uses the darkroom to put forth ideas concerning the American landscape.
[caption id="attachment_4612" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Dandelion, 2008, 16 x 20 inches. "][/caption]
Wildlife Analysis is currently on view at Wild Project (195 E. 3rd Street, NYC) through October 31.
