Book Announcement – Voice of the Eyes (part 3)
“What day is it?” asked Pooh.
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.”
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Today’s a big day for me as I am able to share with you, my foreword. The book is titled “Voice of the Eyes” and below you can read my reasons behind choosing this title. Hope you enjoy it.
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Voice of the Eyes is a collection of interviews with exceptional landscape photographers who have mastered their craft like no other and have helped shape the entire discipline. The book introduces them and sheds light on their creativity and their photographic process. My chosen format for this book was the standardized questionnaire. In this survey, I focused on fifteen questions that I felt were essential both to the creative process and to understand the photographers. Once I had chosen the questions, I asked all the artists to answer those fifteen queries. Although the artists were not in direct exchange with each other, by answering the same questions, each in his or her own unique way, the reader can switch between these answers to get a sense of the diversity of the artists, and thus create this exchange themselves. My hope is that this will turn the reader into the medium that creates this exchange and thereby stimulates his or her own creative process.
Voice of the Eyes perceives photographs as the organ of expression of artists and their visual perception. When it is difficult to verbally express feelings, thoughts, experiences, and ideas, photographs serve as a means of expression and become the voice of the photographers. Thus, this book not only focuses on the photographs of these photographers as their voice, but the book itself becomes a voice of these photographers.
My inspiration to create this book was creativity. I wanted to give time to creativity and show how meaningful it is in landscape photography. In a time characterized by pervasive digitalization and the influence of social media, landscape photography has come under a lot of criticism. This is more than understandable when we see the large number of repetitive subjects and images of iconic places that often have no soul. At best, these photographs seem to be good documentary images of nature, but they often serve as nothing more than beautiful wall hangings. Snapshots or images, but not photographs. These images lack the depth, the mysticism, the questions that are asked anew, the invitation to gaze at these images longer. All characteristics of art. However, there are these photographs and photographers who are passionate about the love of nature, the photographic process, and the beauty of the small detail. It is to these artists that this book is dedicated. It is my intention with this book to show that creativity exists in landscape photography and that these photographers create works with a great deal of heart and depth.
How did I select the photographers included in this book? The achievement and contribution that these selected photographers have given to the discipline of landscape photography and how they have helped to shape it was decisive for me. I was further concerned to show the heterogeneity of these artists. Therefore, selected in this book are both young and mature photographers who work exclusively with film cameras, and others who prefer only the digital world, artists who work documentary and those who work expressively, artists who primarily work with a camera and those who see the narrative storytelling of their works through videos as part of the creative process, heavy users of social media, as well as artists who consciously refrain from using these platforms. They all come together here, meet, and indirectly exchange ideas about the creativity of the photographic process.
So much for the theory. As an active scientist, I have learned above all that the difference between theory and practice is that that difference is actually smaller in theory than in practice. In the end, I have chosen the artists very subjectively and personally. They are wonderful people who have had an intense influence on my own artistic work over the last few years. Whether as a close friend, mentor, or inspirational artist, they are people with whom I have developed a relationship, sometimes even a very close and personal relationship, over recent years. Therefore, this book project, which I wrote in my spare time alongside my job as a scientist, has ultimately become a very personal project and an expression of gratitude for all the wonderful insights that these photographers allowed me to experience.
Let me close this foreword with my hope. This foreword is certainly not the end of this book. My hope is that this book is not even the beginning of the end for the reader. I do hope that this book is the end of the beginning. I would like this book to inspire the creative process of the reader and send them on a long creative journey, whatever they do creatively, may they be photographers themselves, painters, sculptors, poets, musicians, or any other type of artist. And that the art you, the reader, create, becomes your voice to the world.
My gratitude goes to my fellow photographers and artists being interviewed in this book for trusting me and my concept, for the wonderful collaboration, openness, and the passion they show for their art.
In a fast-moving, dynamic world, this book is intentionally slow. It was created with time, commitment, and passion for the unseen, the unheard, and the untouched.
I deeply hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed creating it. Have a great, slow time discovering, reading, admiring, and engaging with the words and images you find between these pages.
Sincerely,
René Algesheimer