Text by Richard B. Woodward, Jasmin Seck, Dr. Petra Roettig.
German-born photographer Renate Aller has been photographing the Atlantic Ocean for over a decade, from a single point on Long Island’s fabled coastline. Her images capture the shifting colors and textures of the sky and water, and the beauty and grandeur of the ocean, providing a rich document of what has made the Hamptons such an integral aspect of New York life. The sublime beauty of this Atlantic view, which Aller connects to the great nineteenth-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, also invokes metaphors for the landscapes of human emotions. Aller’s viewpoint is static, but the changing weather and light allow for a diverse series of images that invite a plethora of associations. Essays place Aller’s work both in the context of landscape photography and the history of images of the Hamptons.
Featured image, "Oceanscape February 3, 2007," from the series oceanscapes – one view – ten years is reproduced from Renate Aller: Oceanscapes. This photograph was also highlighted in Martha Schwendener's New York Times review of the Parrish Art Museum's Fall 2011 exhibition, Artists Choose Artists. Schwendener describes Aller's oceanscapes, as "spectral and evocative, with swirling masses of clouds dwarfing the slivers of sea at the bottom of the photographs."
"Renate Aller's Oceanscapes seem to depict infinity. Since 1999, the artist has photographed the ocean from the same point on Long Island. The photographs show the dynamics of sky and water, reflection and currents. Depending on weather conditions and time of year, the resulting images may be either dramatically expressive, or peaceful, melancho9lic abstractions. One moment the sea seems to swallow the horizon in its endlessness, another moment the transient phenomena of light and cloud dominate. Like the 17th-century Dutch landscape painters who depicted a towering sky above a narrow strip of water, Aller understands the sea-level plane as an endless horizontal space. The fascinating aspect of Aller's photographs, however, is the changing interface, the seam between heaven and earth. Sometimes it is glistening and sharp-edged, the elements apparently reversed, appearing the like color fields of a Mark Rothko painting, place one above the other; sometimes it is fluid and soft, with a barely perceptible line dividing an almost sandy-looking, choppy sea and a flawless blue sky. Thus the images become a theatre of continual change."
Petra Roettig, excerpted from Interfaces in Oceanscapes.
FORMAT: Hbk, 13 x 10 in. / 96 pgs / 47 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $60 ISBN: 9781934435236 PUBLISHER: Radius Books AVAILABLE: 8/30/2010 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WORLD
Published by Radius Books. Text by Richard B. Woodward, Jasmin Seck, Dr. Petra Roettig.
German-born photographer Renate Aller has been photographing the Atlantic Ocean for over a decade, from a single point on Long Island’s fabled coastline. Her images capture the shifting colors and textures of the sky and water, and the beauty and grandeur of the ocean, providing a rich document of what has made the Hamptons such an integral aspect of New York life. The sublime beauty of this Atlantic view, which Aller connects to the great nineteenth-century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, also invokes metaphors for the landscapes of human emotions. Aller’s viewpoint is static, but the changing weather and light allow for a diverse series of images that invite a plethora of associations. Essays place Aller’s work both in the context of landscape photography and the history of images of the Hamptons.
