Eric Baden
These photographs are selected from two areas of investigation into iconography and landscape. They consider the interdependence of meaning and environment.
Art-making, architecture, agriculture, ritual and commerce feed constructed understandings of geology, geography, history and aesthetics; and vice-versa. In the build-up and break-down of collective structures, tangible and imagined, nothing is separate. The flux of time and space mingles with the oscillation of memory and desire.
I recently came across this beautiful observation concerning landscape and image by the Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri:
In 1969 newspapers published the photograph taken from the spaceship traveling to the moon. This was the first photograph of the entire earth. The image that man had pursued for centuries was presented for our view; it held within it all previous, incomplete images, all books that had been written, all signs, those that had been deciphered and those that had not. It was not only the image of the entire world, but the only image that contained all other images of the world: graffiti, frescoes, paintings, writings, photographs, books, films. It was at once the representation of the world and all representations of the world.
At the other end of the scale, the visionary poet and artist William Blake touched on something similar when he famously penned:
To see a world in a grain of sand‚ And a heaven in a wild flower‚ Hold infinity in the palm of your hand‚ And eternity in an hour.
The desert photographs are from Peru. The montaged images combine a Polaroid photograph of an exhibited artwork with a landscape-based film image.