Altered States of Agoraphobia: Landscape Stories Issue 4. (Remains to be Seen)

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Landscape Stories Issue 4. (Remains to be Seen)

A selection of images from my new photo series 'Remains to be Seen' has been published with an original poem in issue 4 of the excellent on-line magazine 'Landscape Stories'. I have been a huge fan of this magazine for a while now and I am honored to be included in this new issue which explores the idea of Traces.

Created in 2010, Landscape Stories is an independent and free online magazine dedicated to the presentation of stories and photographic work. Their aim is to connect a growing number of readers deeply with fine art contemporary photography. Their goal is to bring together a collection of photographers from around the globe and to present their work to a wider audience. Landscape Stories encourage photographers to offer their vision of the world, relating to a certain topics and themes.

Issue #4 TRACES

Traces is the title of Landscape Stories number 04. Trace, clue, wake. Path, scratch, furrow. Print, brand, footprint. Testimony, memory, documentation. Evidence, finding, remain. From the big and transient proportions of Earth and landscape’s skin scars, we go closer until we can decipher and try to understand the wounds that mark the face of a human being. The words that come to our mind are those by Wemer Herzog, about some faces from the film “Herz aus Glas” that recall landscapes.

“I’d be prudent, I’d rather think about the strange phenomena that one has when he looks at some pictures from the 50s, for example. One realises straight away that they are faces from the 50s. In reality I can’t think of faces as if they were like landscapes, maybe I’m particularly allergic to the idea because Kinski always shouted at me when I filmed landscapes. He told me that the human face is by far the most fascinating landscape”

The publication of this personal body of work, which is an exploration of loss, comes poignantly on the eight year anniversary of the passing of Tonje Andersen, who was my long time partner and friend - A great artist too, who will always be missed.

Landscapes Stories, Remains to be Seen feature can be found here:

http://www.landscapestories.net/issue-04/022-simon-kossoff?lang=it#1

Landscape Stories wonderful website can be found here.

http://www.landscapestories.net/?lang=en

1 comment:

Landscape StoriesJuly 6, 2011 at 3:38 PM
thank you very much, Simon!
LS
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Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.