Cutting into photographic negatives to create entirely new landscape compositions is at the heart of London-based artist Dafna Talmore's practice. She transforms familiar scenes into fragmented abstract compositions that challenge how landscape is usually seen and remembered.
Talmore's ongoing series Constructed Landscapes has now been recognized internationally, winning the Professional Category – Landscape at this year's Sony World Photography Awards.
Built through physical interventions in the original negatives, the project turns destruction into a form of image-making – but the process, and what drives it, is best explained by the artist herself.
Article continues below'Constructed Landscapes'
Talmore explains, "I was taking photographs while travelling, trying to capture landscapes that were somehow meaningful to me, but after quite a few years, I became frustrated with the material.
"The images had no meaning beyond my own personal interpretation, and I felt it didn’t go anywhere beyond that. I found it interesting to try to turn that frustration into something productive.
"It gave me the liberation to take the negatives – which I know for many photographers are something you wouldn’t normally interfere with – and to use a scalpel to make interventions directly onto them, in order to reimagine and abstract the landscapes I had encountered.
"The work that has been selected here is from the most recent sub-series of the Constructed Landscape series, from a private commission I was invited to respond to for a particular landscape.
"But I always think the point is to resist specificity and instead create a kind of utopian space, to think about the fragmentation of landscape and the multiple perspectives we experience when we encounter it.
"For me, a single image is never quite enough to convey the experience of standing in front of a landscape, which we usually scan and view from multiple perspectives. It’s about bringing those perspectives into a single image by using multiple fragments of negatives to reconstruct the landscape.
"In this case, it was a private commission, so I was invited to respond to a very specific area. I don’t mind disclosing the location, but in terms of the work, even the titles tend to be made up of codes, which I feel are as much an abstraction as the images themselves.
"They try to mirror that intention, and also to grasp the contradictory impulses of photography – because although the work is rooted in a particular place and location, it is also about resisting that specificity.
"So I am constantly grappling with these contradictions and the limitations of photography – but in a way, that is what drives the work."
For more information and to discover the full list of winners and shortlisted entries, visit the official Sony World Photography Awards website.
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