Touching ground
How do we look at a photograph of a place when there are no anchor points? How do we approach the surface of a landscape, rendered flat in an image, when there is no significant horizon, or when there are no trees for scale? Onto what do we cling our gaze? (Rocks, solid as they may be, are deceptive in size and therefore unreliable.)
Where do our eyes land, coming down from somewhere above?
Photographs aren’t maps. Their frames are limited in dimension, they easily skew proportions and the only real distance they reveal is the one between the camera lens and its focal point – and even that is misleading. In the end, we have no true sense of the landscape we are looking at, as we are merely looking at photographs of it.
‘Stek’ is a word that speaks of a certain space, or a certain spot in a certain space. In this book, Els Martens deals with a certain space, through a series of still photographs. By shifting the view- point gently to the right, she invites us to truly enter the landscape, to explore and to discover it. But by zooming in and out, she simultaneously challenges us to find solid ground.
So we let our eyes float, gently and carefully.
“This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality”, Nan Shepherd writes in The Living Mountain. “Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear.”
In photographs, we depend on the shifting viewpoint of the photographer. Martens moves forward and comes back, before moving forward again. She likes to revisit a place, to revisit the things she sees. She lingers, out of curiosity. She continues to look, continues to discover new elements. She photographs to be able to look again, to look longer, before returning to the place once more. To photograph there again.
In photographs, all living things become static. How long does it take for us to notice the silent dogs, spread out across the land? Is it when the river first appears, acting as a visual lifeline? Spotting the dog next to the running water instantly brings him to life; it brings the entire scene to life. That is what it has become now: a scene.
The more we discover through this subtle progression of images, the more the presumptions we have built up get disrupted. So we go back and look again at the earlier pictures. They no longer look the same, as the place no longer looks the same. At the same time, things look more familiar than ever, as we slowly begin to translate this stretch of land in the photographs into an accessible space in our mind.
Our eyes keep peering; they keep searching the surface, over and over.
The process of scanning the area laid out before us involves movement: moving the pages from left to right, from right to left; moving our look across the full bleed images. The frame of a photograph, as mentioned above, is a restricted one. Its rectangular form only allows you to manoeuvre so far. The same limitation in movement can be found in the curious circles in the landscape; the perfectly round and dark brown figures on the ground that outline the ‘stek’ of each chained dog.
Photography presented in a book usually also deals with another type of movement: the passing of time. When we’re outside, we rely on the movement of the light to inform us, we look at the rising and the setting of the sun. But here, in this barren land way up north, the light plays tricks on us, remaining for much longer, glowing in a soft fluorescent hue that mystifies and once again disorientates.
Although by now we’ve sensed that we’re moving in a linear way through space, we quickly understand that we’re moving in a non-linear way through time. Because Martens moves forward and comes back, before moving forward again.
Turning the pages, we see human clutter, we see a bridge across the river, we see some houses and a satellite dish, and ultimately we see tiny human beings. Things finally fall into place; scales begin to make sense, despite the always slightly shifting focal point. In a way, we are able to bring it home, this image of a place.
Our eyes touch ground.
Text: Stefan Vanthuyne
How do we look at a photograph of a place when there are no anchor points? How do we approach the surface of a landscape, rendered flat in an image, when there is no significant horizon, or when there are no trees for scale? Onto what do we cling our gaze? (Rocks, solid as they may be, are deceptive in size and therefore unreliable.)
Where do our eyes land, coming down from somewhere above?
Photographs aren’t maps. Their frames are limited in dimension, they easily skew proportions and the only real distance they reveal is the one between the camera lens and its focal point – and even that is misleading. In the end, we have no true sense of the landscape we are looking at, as we are merely looking at photographs of it.
‘Stek’ is a word that speaks of a certain space, or a certain spot in a certain space. In this book, Els Martens deals with a certain space, through a series of still photographs. By shifting the view- point gently to the right, she invites us to truly enter the landscape, to explore and to discover it. But by zooming in and out, she simultaneously challenges us to find solid ground.
So we let our eyes float, gently and carefully.
“This changing of focus in the eye, moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality”, Nan Shepherd writes in The Living Mountain. “Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming. By so simple a matter, too, as altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear.”
In photographs, we depend on the shifting viewpoint of the photographer. Martens moves forward and comes back, before moving forward again. She likes to revisit a place, to revisit the things she sees. She lingers, out of curiosity. She continues to look, continues to discover new elements. She photographs to be able to look again, to look longer, before returning to the place once more. To photograph there again.
In photographs, all living things become static. How long does it take for us to notice the silent dogs, spread out across the land? Is it when the river first appears, acting as a visual lifeline? Spotting the dog next to the running water instantly brings him to life; it brings the entire scene to life. That is what it has become now: a scene.
The more we discover through this subtle progression of images, the more the presumptions we have built up get disrupted. So we go back and look again at the earlier pictures. They no longer look the same, as the place no longer looks the same. At the same time, things look more familiar than ever, as we slowly begin to translate this stretch of land in the photographs into an accessible space in our mind.
Our eyes keep peering; they keep searching the surface, over and over.
The process of scanning the area laid out before us involves movement: moving the pages from left to right, from right to left; moving our look across the full bleed images. The frame of a photograph, as mentioned above, is a restricted one. Its rectangular form only allows you to manoeuvre so far. The same limitation in movement can be found in the curious circles in the landscape; the perfectly round and dark brown figures on the ground that outline the ‘stek’ of each chained dog.
Photography presented in a book usually also deals with another type of movement: the passing of time. When we’re outside, we rely on the movement of the light to inform us, we look at the rising and the setting of the sun. But here, in this barren land way up north, the light plays tricks on us, remaining for much longer, glowing in a soft fluorescent hue that mystifies and once again disorientates.
Although by now we’ve sensed that we’re moving in a linear way through space, we quickly understand that we’re moving in a non-linear way through time. Because Martens moves forward and comes back, before moving forward again.
Turning the pages, we see human clutter, we see a bridge across the river, we see some houses and a satellite dish, and ultimately we see tiny human beings. Things finally fall into place; scales begin to make sense, despite the always slightly shifting focal point. In a way, we are able to bring it home, this image of a place.
Our eyes touch ground.
Text: Stefan Vanthuyne