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August 8, 2011
For the last five winters Lisa M. Robinson has been photographing snowbound landscapes with her 4×5 view camera. We don't see these landscapes in Australia other than the Victorian high country, the Snowy Mountains and Kosciuszko National Park.
In these white landscapes are traces of human existence: lonely hammock, a trampoline or a swimming pool. The images are layered in time: what went before before the snow, the now of winter, and what will come once the snow melts.
Lisa M. Robinson, Old Soul, from the Snowbound series
The work looks American in that it is rooted in a combined tradition of the New Color photographers of the 1970s and the New Topographics.
In this interview she says:
In the winter of 2002, I decided to take a road trip to Ohio.....Somewhere along a highway in Pennsylvania, I encountered snow. And immediately, I felt the rush of something new, something I had never quite seen before, or at least not in this way. It was just so beautiful… no other word could quite capture it for me. But it was not a beauty of nature that I was drawn to… trees and mountains and sky. I was drawn to our very human world. I made the same kinds of pictures I’ve always made, depicting a human presence even in the absence of humans. I was in a constant state of awe… I remember simply gasping in wonder. For the first time in a very long time, I was experiencing something pure and beautiful in the world, something very new and hopeful.
On the other hand going into wilderness alone without a guide is stepping into seeming emptiness, an unknown space, and then confronting oneself.
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