The Cohen Amador Gallery is pleased to announce “Broken Line” photographs of Greenland by internationally renowned photographer Olaf Otto Becker from his newly published book of the same title. In the German photographer’s second exhibition at the Cohen Amador Gallery, he progresses from his serene photo investigation of Iceland and moves to the billowing ice fields, sprawling glaciers and triple-insulated shacks of the planet’s largest island.
Having trained as a painter, Becker has transposed the patient methodology of that medium onto the instantaneity of photography. With his large format 8 x 10 camera he allows his landscapes to communicate with him, sometimes waiting for days for the conditions to be correct. When viewing his series from Greenland the result of this unique photographic style becomes apparent; Becker is not taking photographs, he is receiving and articulating the landscape. Though formally structured like the easel paintings of 19th century romanticists, Becker effectively translates the landscape as portrait, isolating the stoicism and melancholia of a land that few know and, due to climate change, few ever will.
Becker pursues his art like an explorer, both in the great lengths to which he goes to attain his photographs, and in his search for imagery that articulates the splendor of an unknown world. Yet, like an explorer the images are infused with the desire to know what exists beyond the visible exterior. Indeed, there is a tension subtly imbedded within the series. Photographs of the houses of Greenland’s few residents are presented devoid of people. Despite being empty, a ghostly sense of human presence pervades, evinced by clothes and possessions strewn about both inside and outside. Their absence seems temporary yet somehow alarming, alluding to events and circumstances that lie beneath the surface of the image. That same curiosity and awareness of greater happenings pervades the other images in the series as well. Several feature enormous ice cliffs and placid waters which span the entire photograph: scenes so calm that they seem to foreshadow coming changes and invest the viewer with a desire to know what lies over these immense sheets of ice. Other photos feature massive icebergs floating, their size put into relief by how serenely they rest in the water and yet their reflection reminds us that the greater bulk of their mass lies underneath the surface, available only to our imaginations. This is the tension of Greenland, which Becker has presented in a stunning visual synthesis of color and light, he effectively captures mankind’s timeless desire for exploration as well as a contemporary sense of melancholy at the changing face of our world.
Becker has exhibited widely in Europe and the US. His first book Under the Nordic Light was short-listed for the renowned 2006 Rencontres D’Arles Book Award and his images from Iceland were featured at the Reykjavik Museum of Photography. Broken Line, published by Hatje Cantz, is the winner of the "Deutsche Fotobuchpreis” 2008.
