|
January 25, 2014
Claudia Terstappen is a German-born photographer who studied at the Dusseldorf art academy and is now Professor of Photography at Monash University in Melbourne She moved to Australia in late 2004.
Claudia Terstappen has an exhibition at the Monash Gallery of Art, at Wheelers Hill, Melbourne, which is entitled “In the Shadow of Change". It features around 75 of Claudia Terstappen’s landscape photographs that were made between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s and more often than not - represent sites of spiritual significance and environmental change
Some of these landscape images are in tonally rich black and white medium format landscape images of unspoiled or wild places from around the world
Claudia Terstappen, Curtain fig tree (Queensland, Australia), 2002, From the series Our ancestors 1990-, gelatin silver print
So many are made on film and would often require long exposures to get the depth of field. I admire the Australian landscapes because of the density of the images, or rather they represent the density of the rainforest. The density and multiplicity of the rainforest, and the bush, forces the photographer to inquire into image making.
Claudia Terstappen, Cabbage trees (Queensland, Australia), 2002, From the series Our ancestors 1990--, gelatin silver print
Terstappen layers shapes within these photographs and she makes reference to the object's sculptural characteristics--the object's sculptural sensation of a physical encounter in space.
The images refer to a sense of the sublime and suggest a link to indigenous cultures.
|
