Mercredi 29 Avril 2015 16:50:59 par Clarisse Treilles dans Expositions

After concluding his series "Wald" (Forest), which he presented at the Alfred Ehrhardt Foundation in 2012, Michael Lange felt drawn to the region of the Upper Rhine. With this new series he has captured a realm of nature shaped by permanent, extremely rapid, and correspondingly intense change.

“My images express a longing for peace and fulfillment, depth and beauty—and the desire to lose oneself. A part of my work is to trace the unceasing process of change until a landscape is in harmony with internal images that express my feelings. To understand the depth, inherent order and aesthetic within apparent chaos. To transform the landscape in combination with external influences—fog, frost, the change of the seasons, light, the water level—in correspondence with my imagination, to play with the elements, to take them a step further and combine them with my photographic language.”

© Michael Lange

Lange pursued this theme over a period of three years and often stayed for weeks on end in the midst of the special landscape of the Rheinaue wetlands, in order to photograph the quiet flow of the water in the muted light of early morning, the riverbanks gently lined with trees, and the fog-covered surface of the water. The photographer’s precise knowledge of the tensions inherent to natural processes is indebted to these experiences, as is the immense sense of calm emitted by the images. The apparently motionless surfaces of the water suggest hidden depths below. In the breath-taking, abstract detail of its agitated surfaces, the river, whose advance into these areas goes almost completely unchecked, unfolds its entire threatening, driving, unrestrained, relentless, unpredictable, and formative power, which follows laws of its own. The finest gradations of tone and color produce compositions of atmospheric intensity and distilled clarity.

© Michael Lange



© Michael Lange