Distant Views – Still Lives
The greatest revelation is silence, wrote the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu in the 6th century BC.
With silence, you can see small things, see seemingly inconspicuous things, very big. With stillness and distance, the overlooked transforms itself, the existing concretizes itself through the abstraction in itself. In seeming emptiness, a stillness is visualized, the photographic view is devoted to the whole, the detail, the in-between, to dissolve, to condense, to arrange without hierarchizing.
The world shows the patterns it contains, forms find their analogies, associations tell stories. Foils, ruffled by the wind, appear as ascending cranes, circus tents form up into red peaks in a snowy landscape. A fish that, enthusiastic about its element, glows brightly through the heights of the deep sea, and withered but delicate blossoms that rise on wintery overgrown trees, the crowns of which may not break under the weight of the white.
The renegotiation of closeness as a conscious act of not overcoming distance thus reveals itself as a gesture of seeing and making visible.
‘If you keep your distance, you have not necessarily moved away.’ (Edith Linvers)