Artist: Edgar Martins
Title: When Light Casts no Shadow
Date: 2008
"In reflecting on the complexity of the negotiations between estranged lives and de-territorialized worlds, one might wonder if the generic city is synonymous with the contemporary airport. Immured in temporality and suffering from a sense of historical discontinuity, the airport is the elementary expression of abstract space. It renders everyone weightless. It is the space of the uprooted."
Methods/ techniques
The images were produced at night, using the aprons’ floodlights, moonlight, long or double exposures of between twenty minutes to two hours.
Description
The artist's subject in this series are the airports on the Azores archipelago, unique in being amongst the very few black-tarred runways in the world. The airport runways are shot at night allowing for great contrast between the fluorescent painted signs and runway markings against a pitch black backdrop. One could hardly recognize them as photographs of the runways due to their incredibly abstract and minimalist nature.
I like how the long depth of field in the photos gives a sense of never-ending space even though the focus of the images are the details of the lines on the runway. In some instances, the runway even seems to merge with the night sky and the absence of any other objects to interrupt the lines further highlights the vast depth of field. I also feel that the entirely black night sky, being devoid of any moonlight and stars, looks very unnatural, and gives the airstrip an an unearthly appearance. The series looks like a collection of photographs of airstrip on a alien planet. The artist gives us a stunning view of a subject that we do not usually considered to be beautiful.
Labels: dsdn144
Post a Comment