A Scape

In the historical context both terms ‘city’ and ‘landscape’ are presented as dichotomies, clearly marked by the city wall as a man-made boundary to distinguish between cultured space and wilderness. The photographic series ‘A Scape’ questions the perceived opposition between these two terms and sets out a quest for a new space in-between land and city, transforming both city and nature into a strange space of indeterminate expanse and texture.

Klenz travelled to solitary sites at the edges of London that would have inspired Romantic artists such as William Turner and Casper David Friedrich but her photographs do not define this peripheral borderland as a ‘green belt’ but rather as displaced areas. At first glance the viewer perceives vast mountain ranges with magnificent peaks and canyons or desert-like landscapes, but these landscapes are man-made, abandoned and left to their own devises.

Utilizing a large format camera with a tilt-shift lens enabled Klenz to drastically alter perspective and scale and depth of field within her photographs. She was able to register enormous quantities of precise visual information in her photographs and at the same time throw whole sections of the image disorientingly out of focus. Only on closer inspection do they razor-sharp details in the photographs reveal themselves: tire tracks, footprints, left over waste such as a plastic bottle or a crips wrapper. Slade Green, Sunbury, Becontree … these are exhausted and exploited derelict landscapes shown with a sense of monumentality. These are landscapes exploited for their natural resources and abandoned by people, as if they were echoes, mere shadows of their original form. What upon first encounter seems a familiar view –dry mountain ranges and dusty valleys – disintegrates under scrutiny.

These images are contemporary reinterpretations of a traditional landscape and Klenz uses the power of detail and the aesthetic beauty in these images to highlight the man-made subtraction and exploitation of natural resources from the land. These photographs highlight the beauty of the earth we share but they also expose the damage, deliberately or carelessly, we are inflicting on our environment.

*The title of each image reveals the tube stop Klenz travelled to in order to photograph the site.