On Christophe von Hohenberg's White Album
by Xin Fu |
August 2021
|
What makes black-and-white photography timeless? What are the strategies and features applied by black-and-white photographers? How does the absence of color in photography affect our way of seeing? Christoper Von Hohenberg’s current exhibition “ The white Album of the Hamptons” is unveiling the answer with those poetic images and intensified emotions.
CVH’s artistic, intellectual and philosophical curiosity has been focused on the nature of time and the truth of history — present time, individual memories, the remote past, and concerns about the future. Under his lens, photography no longer connotes the quick satisfaction of the snapshot or the magic of the decisive moment. Rather, his photographs evoke the infinite and the immeasurable.
When I saw White Album at the first time, I thought of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascape, the horizon is separated the upper and lower halves of the image equally, between the sky and the ocean. He translated his oriental esthetic sensation and profound spirituality into those Rothko painting like’s images by using muted grays and withholding an easy-to-construe theme.
Art historian Kerry Brougher writes, "To look at one seascape is to appreciate the precise composition, the tonal gradations, the clarity of detail." Seascapes encourage viewers to study the horizon line, search the water for waves or the sky for a trace of mist. CVH’s White Album has got Sugimoto’s numinous simplicity and impeccable craftsmanship, visual beauty and perfection. What CVH has more is his masterfully insert the human/animal presence in his space and time, imagination and reality, past and future.
Drawing on the classical photographic tradition, CVH creates distilled, meditative images which unite the concrete and abstract, and contain meaningful conceptual underpinnings which seek to materialize the ‘invisible realm of the mind’ and the unconscious. In his process, CVH seeks to comprehend the nature of perception, exploring duration and temporality through photography, and an understanding of how radical shifts through the past enlighten the present.
I stopped in the front of one photo, the surfers were walking toward the sea. My mind is flowing to the Chinese landscape paintings in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). In their visionary landscapes, among those magnificent mountains and lavish trees, there were little ordinary human figures blended harmoniously with the nature.
CVH’s White Album certainly answered the questions of the power and beauty of black&white photography, furthermore it sings like the Beatles, timeless and universal. Simply just because the humanity is all we need.
CVH’s artistic, intellectual and philosophical curiosity has been focused on the nature of time and the truth of history — present time, individual memories, the remote past, and concerns about the future. Under his lens, photography no longer connotes the quick satisfaction of the snapshot or the magic of the decisive moment. Rather, his photographs evoke the infinite and the immeasurable.
When I saw White Album at the first time, I thought of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Seascape, the horizon is separated the upper and lower halves of the image equally, between the sky and the ocean. He translated his oriental esthetic sensation and profound spirituality into those Rothko painting like’s images by using muted grays and withholding an easy-to-construe theme.
Art historian Kerry Brougher writes, "To look at one seascape is to appreciate the precise composition, the tonal gradations, the clarity of detail." Seascapes encourage viewers to study the horizon line, search the water for waves or the sky for a trace of mist. CVH’s White Album has got Sugimoto’s numinous simplicity and impeccable craftsmanship, visual beauty and perfection. What CVH has more is his masterfully insert the human/animal presence in his space and time, imagination and reality, past and future.
Drawing on the classical photographic tradition, CVH creates distilled, meditative images which unite the concrete and abstract, and contain meaningful conceptual underpinnings which seek to materialize the ‘invisible realm of the mind’ and the unconscious. In his process, CVH seeks to comprehend the nature of perception, exploring duration and temporality through photography, and an understanding of how radical shifts through the past enlighten the present.
I stopped in the front of one photo, the surfers were walking toward the sea. My mind is flowing to the Chinese landscape paintings in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). In their visionary landscapes, among those magnificent mountains and lavish trees, there were little ordinary human figures blended harmoniously with the nature.
CVH’s White Album certainly answered the questions of the power and beauty of black&white photography, furthermore it sings like the Beatles, timeless and universal. Simply just because the humanity is all we need.