There is a penchant, over the past ten to fifteen years or so, for photographic image-making to re-examine landscapes as scratchy abstractions, almost imperceptibly detailed beyond the reach of their granular vistas. This is most evident in the work of Korean/American artist Jungjin Lee, whose series of books and bodies of work detail the shift from a landscape of clarity and reason to one that is permeated by a deep pictorial subjectivity that extends the landscape into the ether. These images are brooding and abstract yet retain something familiar, and they are pretty beautiful. I am reminded of the grain found in the work of pictorialists such as F. Holland Day and Robert Demachy, even if the subject matter is different. Of more recent offerings, Dominic Turner’s book False Friends shares in the intensity of grain and an interest in landscapes. Similar attitudes can be found in Mikael Siirilä’s work.
If I were to guess the reason for this shift in the landscape back toward something that resonates with the pictorialist movement, I would add some conjecture about how both epochs stood at a profound moment of change when technology was shaping the world in new and sometimes unnerving ways. One hundred years ago, the question was aimed at velocity, automobiles, and the towering overtake of our cities by skyscrapers. The loss of social life to sidewalks instead of streets and a horizon line dotted with extractive oil derricks hammering away at the earth, pumping its black blood out for our consumption, likely raised some debate about where the world was heading. It is no different in mid-2020, though our questions about extraction, petro-economies, oil, and our cities are slightly different, with a profound discussion about what it might be like to live through the Anthropocene and our inability to stop all progress in the throes of late-stage capitalism. This suggests a reframing of the landscape, of our natural world, and of our attitude toward it, both visually and in terms of how we “feel” toward our natural habitats.
There is something ominous and opaque in the work of the contemporary artists that I mentioned. I can’t quite place it, but a feeling of monumental isolation begins to settle in at the base of the spine. The landscapes feel barren and cold, and are fraught with a sense of decay and a destructive ambience that is both beautiful and threatening. I find the same feeling in Daphne Kotsiani’s new book, These Earthly Shores, published by Origini Edizioni. The book is another in a series of Origini classics in which the tactile materiality of the book object enables the images to be viewed in hand as well as on the page in a type of syncronous continuum between hand and eye. In leafing through the pages, one encounters acetane pages, mixed with delicate panoramas of landscape thoroughly thought through in layout. The book is thin and fragile, yet the ink does most of the lifting, printed in dark tones, allowing Kotsiani’s photographs to have a specific weight in line with their subject matter. Trace details of agates, reminiscent of Roger Callois’ study of agates in his collection, though in monochrome.
Kotsiani’s images fit the publisher’s output very well, and I get the sense that, along with the poem by Dimitris Leontzakos, the book’s strength outside of Kotsiani’s beautiful, if forlorn, images is its pacing and the tactility mentioned above. It is another in a series of great books from Origini Edizioni, which is making a much-needed mark in handmade books, with an eye for detail that does not get lost in the morass of overdesign or folly. These books are ordered around the work of their artists, so as not to impede the work or the audience’s reception of it. Their wise choice of materials also adds layers to the handling of the work and, in the case of Kotsiani, to her melancholic yet sublime landscapes. Highly recommended.
