Untitled (1212-2)

This artwork featured in Synthetic Landscapes (2017).

For years, my work consisted predominantly of photographs taken in interior spaces, with mere suggestions of outside space. Whenever I stepped outside with my camera, I felt burdened by the history of landscape loaded with clichéd tropes and pictorial conventions. Despite this and driven by a sentimental desire to produce a nostalgic memento, I found myself aimlessly yet compulsively photographing landscapes whenever I travelled.

This growing personal archive forms the basis of Constructed Landscapes, an ongoing project of photographs-initially shot as mere keepsakes-of Israel, Venezuela, the UK and US. Produced by collaging medium format colour negatives, the process relies on experimentation, involving several incisions and configurations before a right match is achieved.

The resulting images are staged landscapes, a conflation combining the ‘real’ and the imaginary, transforming a specific place- initially loaded with personal meaning and political connotations- into a space of greater universality. Blurring place, memory and time, the work alludes to idealised and utopian spaces.

In dialogue with the history of photography, Constructed Landscapes references Pictorialist processes of combination printing as well as Modernist experiments with the materiality of film. Whilst distinctly holding historical references, the work engages with contemporary discourse on manipulation, the analogue/digital divide and the effects these have on photography’s status.

(Constructed Landscapes consists of an ongoing project made up of two sub-series.)

-Dafna Talmor

Image: Dafna Talmor, Untitled (1212-2), C-type prints made of collaged and montaged negatives, 2017. Image courtesy of the artist. 

 

About the artist

Dafna Talmor

Dafna Talmor exhibited in Synthetic Landscapes, Weston Park and Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery, 2017.

Image: Dafna Talmor, Untitled (1212-2), from the Constructed Landscapes series, 2012-13. C-type prints made of collaged and montaged negatives. Courtesy the artist.