Northern Light

Nathaniel Bell - Hyde Park, Leeds

Nathaniel Bell (b.1996) is contemporary documentary photographer located in the Midlands, UK. His work follows a form of narrative be it social, political or factual information and explores the interaction between individuals and their surroundings. For the most part he uses traditional analogue methods along with modern post-production technology. Documenting people in their every day lives is a recurring theme in his work.

He is drawn to the unseen, and sometimes disregarded areas of society and aims to portray them in a new light producing a body of work that truly reflects what he sees. Encompassing love for design, publications and various print methods he fosters new creative ways of presenting his work.

website - www.nathanielbell.co.uk
email - natbell1@hotmail.co.uk

Martin Bence - Substation

My practice based PhD research seeks to establish a conceptual link between the visual language of my photographic practice and the properties of often overlooked landscapes between the urban and rural as an assemblage capable of invoking enchantment. Enchantment in this context refers to an unsettling encounter with things when viewed through the theoretical lens of a less human-centric position, where objects can become empowered by their relationship with other matter and the assemblages they form.  

Based in Manchester, much of my work has centred upon the Trafford Centre shopping complex. This image is of an electricity substation which serves the shopping centre and surrounding business and retail parks.

email - mbenceassoc@hotmail.com

Lidia Bianchi - Inner

In my artistic practice I’m used to work mainly with photography and its ontological issues with the referent, focusing my visual research both on universal and intimate perception of the passing time, connected to Nature’s perception and landscape’s changes.
My aim is to give birth to images that works like aesthetic intuitions and metaphoric distillations of both natural and anthropological things, standing up against our understanding and interpretation of the phenomenic reality and trying to go beyond it, towards the untouchable Truth. This vertigo generates archetypal reminiscences in eyes and mind and leads us to spiritually rejoin Nature and our ancestral perception of it.
All I want to do with my research is trying to take distance from today’s images invasion that causes mind’s oblivion, and recover somewhere only our ancient inner nature knows.

website -  www.lidiabianchi.com
email - lidiabianchi1992@gmail.com

Harry Botley - Verdigris II

Taking place in a disused quarry, the series creates a barren non-place out of the photographed landscape; which teters on the edge of what we know to be real. By altering the more commonplace colours of the environment, the photographic dialogue becomes defamiliarised. This disrupts the way in which these landscapes are observed. Focusing upon a layered composition the artist creates a sense of vastness, this is attempted by careful consideration of sculptural elements and distance within the landscape. Through the alteration of colour, intuitive composition and utilisation of structure, Verdigris seeks to recontextualise traditional landscape photography; heightening the overall aesthetic experience. The series takes its name from the substance that appears on copper and bronze metals once oxidised - changing the metal's appearance to a blue/green hue. Offering a further comment on both the nature of time and change within the landscape.

website - www.harrybotley.com
email - harrybotley@yahoo.co.uk

Jacqueline Butler - Yearning for Peaty Gleys: between agricultural and ceremonial

Angus known as the birthplace of Scotland, home of historical sites such as Arbroath Abbey associated with the Scottish declaration of independence in 1320, the county has a large number of Pictish carved stones. Whilst following one of many Pictish trails I discovered Seaton Den, an inlet located just off the coastal path near Arbroath. From this site of natural beauty, the track led to the soft fruit farmland of East Seaton. On viewing acres of polytunnels stripped of their polythene covers and bereft of fruit, they seemed to fill the gulf between the mythical and the real. Appearing as magical as the standing stones from Pictish times, the hoops made from unassuming materials of galvanised steel were monumental yet fragile. Surveying landscape as place of identity, the work explores the mythology of Scottish landscape against the social climate of a post-referendum era, charting a yearning for homeland, existing through distant childhood memory, local folklore and imagination.

website - www.jacquelinebutler.org
email - j.a.butler@mmu.ac.uk

Anne Campbell  - As The Mist Rolls In

In March this year, hundreds of motorists were trapped in their vehicles overnight, two men went into the hills with their dog and never came home, an elderly man walked to his neighbours and was found frozen in a snowdrift. In March, I watched as the blizzard cleared and the mountain revealed itself only to slowly be reclaimed by the mist.

Handprinted analogue image taken in the North of Scotland, March 2018.

Part of ongoing work on the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

website - www.annecampbell.photography
email - m.a.campbell@rgu.ac.uk

Louis William Clay - Torr Dubh Mòr

The Isle of Arran — located within the Firth of Clyde — has a population density of approximately ten people per square kilometre. The remote island is renowned for its geological diversity, resulting in a huge variation of landscape, from weather-beaten coastline to precipitous ridges and peaks.

Torr Dubh Mòr is an exploration of the visceral yearning for isolation, and the complex relationship between solitude and loneliness. The use of a large format field camera allows space for contemplation and reflection by slowing down the photographic process, blended with the primal and meditative act of walking through the land.

website - www.cargocollective.com/louiswilliamclay
email - louiswilliamclay@gmail.com

Jill Cole - Firing Range #1

Through a winter landscape of a military firing range reference is made to the interrelationship between conflict, beauty and renewal in a context of war.

This image is drawn from a larger body of work created on military training land in North Yorkshire.  Created in an environment of international conflict, the aim is to locate our own distanced realities within an ongoing presence of war.

website - www.jillcole.com
email - jill@jillcole.com

Neil Dyson - From The Series 'Myrkur'

This series from Northern Europe’s edges and extreme landscapes explores early notions of the Sublime as developed by Edmund Burke in the 18th Century. Burke discussed the idea in terms of both astonishment and terror at mans impotence when faced with powerful forces of nature.

My Landscape Photography is not about copying the straight jacket of convention - the endless sunsets and blurred waterfalls that depict a natural landscape as ‘pretty’, it is about responding to the environment, feeling the rain on my face and the cold in my bones. The images stare into the Abyss and confront the elements.

As Burke stated… ‘The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment: and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror …'

website - www.neildyson.com
email - ndyson@dmu.ac.uk

David Eaton - One Hundred & Fifty Metres From Where I Started (West), from Navigating the Moor, 2017

This work explores the upland environment of the Pennines, through the mechanics of navigation – with its bearings, timing, and pacing – and is something of a process led enquiry. Through it I hope to develop a personal approach to ‘apprehending' this featureless terrain of which Robert Macfarlane has said (of similar): “They seem to return the eye’s enquiries unanswered, or swallow all attempts at interpretation. They confront us with the problem of purchase: how to anchor perception in a context of vastness, how to make such a place ‘mean’ ...we find it hard to make language grip landscapes that are close-toned, but that also excel in expanse, reach and transparency.”

website - www.davideaton.co.uk

Nettie Edwards - Across The Land (Southern Sweden, Early Spring)

In early 2016 I undertook a three month-long residency, living in the village of Harlösa, Skåne where every year, thousands of migatory birds come to breed on land used as an army training ground. My work there was created during exploratory journeys across the land on foot or by car: a landscape of long, winding roads and vast, empty skies waiting for something to happen... just beyond the horizon.

website - lumilyon.wordpress.com
email - net@nettieweb.co.uk

Tom Harrison - Variance

My work considers the tensions which exist between the built environment and our curated wilderness, in the age of the anthropocene. I'm particularly interested in the ongoing expansion of liminal spaces, in which the clear delineation between man-made and natural begins to blur.

email - t.harrison@shu.ac.uk

Aileen Harvey - Mostly water

From a series of eighteen postcards sent while walking the length of the Western Isles archipelago from north to south. A card was composed each day and sent from the first postbox passed. The postcard's picture face carries a text relating to the sea, rain, puddles, wet socks - a written image of water. These snapshots from the journey went to a friend at home in London. Using language alone, the cards should function as picture postcards would, but the written images have a different kind of life. The sequence also builds a map or index of the walk through this liminal landscape, sea-surrounded and honeycombed by lochs.

website - www.aileenharvey.co.uk
email - aileenjrharvey@yahoo.co.uk

Fergus Heron - Cawdor Burn, Highlands, Scotland

This work is from a new series of photographs made in the Highlands of Scotland around a woodland and river. Landscape in this work has close proximity, rather than a distant view. The photograph aims to work as a picture that visualises qualities of light, form and colour to create a set of tensions between vision and knowledge.

website - www.fergusheron.com
email - contact@fergusheron.com

  Henry E Iddon - Fence Post. Sgurr na h-Eanchainne, Scotland, 2017.

In mountain and wilderness landscapes it is often difficult for the viewer to grasp scale, and when certain weather conditions prevail all sense of scale is lost. Snow and low cloud can result in what is known as a 'whiteout' where all sense of location, scale and perspective is lost. The terrain still exists however, and is codified by cartographers who utilize both natural and man made features, such as fence lines, to delineate space through measurement of proximity and space from a given point. The information that is mapped can then be read and imagined as a 3D space.

website - www.henryiddon.com
email - h@henryiddon.com

Melanie King - Ancient Light, Seltun Geothermal Area, Iceland

This image was created during a residency in Reykjavik in Iceland, February 2018 to create works for my Ancient Light series. During this residency I was interested in capturing images of the stars and aurora borealis, and exploring dark landscapes alone at night.

Ancient Light explores how light from incredibly distant stars can be captured directly onto photosensitive film. To create these images, photons emitted from stars travel over millions of years through the void of space. The photon then travels through Earths’ atmosphere and through the camera lens, at which point the photon is physically absorbed by the silver halide crystals suspended in the film. When processed, the silver halide crystals turn black as they come into contact with developer and fixer. For me, these negatives are as precious as a meteorite or fossil, as their material structure is formed by the passage of incomprehensible periods of time and distance.

website - www.melaniek.co.uk
email - melanie.king@network.rca.ac.uk

Lukasz Kubicki - He touch my hand, and whispered to my ear

The medium of photography through its technicality is preoccupied with time – its unhuman temporality. Where the amount of light striking the negative is determined by duration in which camera’s aperture will open and close.
Yet, what would be revealed if instead of using photographic technicality to record moment, we exposure the longer duration; instead of moving through multiplicity of moments we perceive them as one, inseparably abstracting it from absolute reality, compounded in a single static image.
I approach the subject of the Welsh landscape with an objective mind, as an immigrant, with no pre-conception or memory connection to it. Opening of the aperture for long duration enables me to move away from the camera, observe and interact with the landscape – being part of it through the act of ‘spending time’, where settings and actions can leave a trace; the apparatus, myself and landscape, inform a very act of photographing.

website - www.lukaszkubicki.com
email - info@lukaszkubicki.com

J.Fitzgerald Lee - Tree Stump

A computer-generated texture map produced from 40 images for use in Photogrammetry.

email - j.lee@shu.ac.uk

Joehari Lee -  A-B #3

From a series of photographs taken on public transport. The image is an amalgamation of the still and moving. A fragmented, chopped vision of the world. In this stretched instance a scene from a train window.

website - www.joehari.com

Anna Lilleengen - May Blossoming Field

Created with an 1870s plate camera on a handmade negative and processed with traditional techniques, this image employs a Brechtian 'verfremdungseffekt'/ distanciation, to highlight and resolve a problematic area of landscape romanticism. First by inviting the viewer to experience a sublime moment of wholeness, then, by bringing to the surface the technical procedures of the medium, requiring a more critical engagement.

So, first there is a ‘falling into’ the depth of the landscape image, then there is the shock of awakening, Neither the romantic nor the critical are invalid: both exist in a state of tension. The viewer is encouraged to question the nature of the reality (as exemplified in the landscape) that they have conceived and think that they are experiencing, but is also offered an experience of the wholeness or sublime which the romantic vision encapsulates.

The objective is to stimulate an internal discourse: to balance the conceptual with the experience of the sublime.

website - www.annalilleengen.com
email - annalilleengen@gmail.com

Moira Lovell - Markham Main (1996) 2009 taken from the series We Still Stand

We Still Stand consists of three discrete photographic series, each made during the 25th anniversary of the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike. Instead of defining moments of strike action and conflict, these photographs demand a different kind of emotional and political response to those taken during the strike. They speak not solely to an individual and specific moment of crisis, but to issues which stand outside that time. Revisiting locations where major political events took place, Lovell’s images remind us of life’s losses; the loss of an industry, the passing of an era and the departure of communities built on coal.

website - www.moiralovell.com
email - moira_lovell@hotmail.com

Neil McCoubrey - The Eagles Nest?

I photograph in relatively remote, sparsely populated landscapes such as The Scottish Highlands, Hebrides, Shetland, and Iceland. Here I have noticed that other photographers want to emphasise the natural beauty and sublimity of such places and this leads them to eliminate all signs of human presence. Conversely, I am drawn to the vernacular. This is not a conscious action but something intuitive. I am not overtly commenting on the man-made or trying to be political.  Instead I find an accidental beauty and often strong narratives in the juxtapositions of the man-made and the natural landscape.

website - www.neilmccoubrey.com
blog - www.marginalstructures.co.uk
email - neil@neilmccoubrey.com

Charly Milner - Eyjafjallajokull

My work explores the relationship between the human race and our landscape that surrounds us - how human interaction effects our environment we live in, as well as nature dictating certain events and disasters. Natural disasters often affect people in both close proximity as well as the wider community. This work focuses on the 2010 eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and how the glass-rich ash plume that was ejected 8km into the atmosphere directly under the jet stream caused both local farming disruption as well as large scale closure of the western and northern European air space.

website - www.instagram.com/charlymilnerphoto
email - charlymilner@outlook.com

Les Monaghan - Sunrise, North Yorkshire Moors, December 2012

The North Yorkshire Moors National Park hosts RAF survival courses for aircrew in training. This airman has spent the night alone building a shelter, searching for six items of flora and fauna that would aid survival, building a fire set that will ignite in under thirty seconds, hanging reflective items and markers to highlight his position, having a strip wash, cooking and eating a potato, having four hours rest (minimum) and collecting thirty-six hours worth of firewood. He is facing the rising sun and still has more than two hours of isolation in which he must not communicate with others. The photograph speaks of the artist's required distance from each subject, our distance from the convenience of the twenty-first century and our ever present proximity to war. The image is part of a large body of work often exhibited as A Series of Dislocating Events.

website - www.relativepoverty.org
email - lesmonaghanphoto@gmail.com

Nicola Neate - To the Lighthouse

A February Sunday walk to a favourite haunt. The North Sea wind blows cold and unforgiving, forcing me up to the cliff tops. The coarse, unruly grass underlines the harshness of this day. The now redundant lighthouse stands resolute in the distance - as evidence and a tribute to our struggle for survival in an inhospitable landscape. This is a place for contemplation; a place to consider the brevity of life and the infinite, complex beauty of nature.

website - www.nicola-neate.squarespace.com
email - neatenicola@gmail.com

Joel Porter - Tourists stand outside of work-time

On first reflection this landscape depicts a busy rural scene within the Lake District National Park, but this is a digital construct. The photograph represents the landscape over a fixed period of time and documents every visitor during that duration, on closer inspection no one is engaging with those around them as they were never there at the same time. This work investigates the perception of the countryside and the visitor experience.

website - www.joelporter.co.uk
email - joel@joelporter.co.uk

Willie Robb - From Zeebrugge

This photograph is part of a project I have recently completed called European Ferries. Physically the images depict historical links connecting the UK to its current continent, a situation that is subject to change. Metaphorically the photographs consider horizons and the UK's divisive cultural attitude towards them.

Britain’s proximity to other European countries has enabled a relationship built on freedom and cooperation. The UK is unique in one specific geographical way to its EC neighbours in that it is an island. The distance afforded in being surrounded by water can provide security but also potentially has the capacity to enhance isolation. Bisected completely by the horizon separating the sea from the sky the photographs become less about passenger ferries arriving at the UK coastline and more about the perception of space and ownership.

"From Zeebrugge" was made at Sunk Island at the mouth of the Humber, East Riding of Yorkshire.

website - www.willierobb.com
email - info@willierobb.com

Andrew Robinson - "In a small and narrow clearing..."

A three-day photographic journey on foot from Carlton near Selby in North Yorkshire to Shipley Glen near Baildon in West Yorkshire, walking continuously for 8 hours a day to retrace the journey undertaken by my uncle Dr A. E. Jones in the summer of 1947, on his return by bicycle from a school harvest camp after falling ill. Monday 10th – Wednesday 12th July 2017

Extending my exploration of the journey as a strategy for both photographic production and a medititive experience of landscape, this body of work weaves together multiple narratives exploring family and social history alongside agricultural and industrial change in the northern landscape.

Andrew is a Senor Lecturer in Photography at Sheffield Hallam University; treasurer for the Association of Photography in Higher Education; and founder and curator of the online photobook resource ‘Photobiliophile.co.uk’

website - www.anthology.co.uk
website - www.photobibliophile.co.uk
email - andrew@anthology.co.uk

Sonya Robinson - The Withdrawn Image, 2017

I photograph images of landscape reflected in black Perspex, specifically the landscape architecture of gardens and parks.  This material allows me to abstract the image through a process of bending and distortion that result in images in which form is accentuated through an increase in contrast.  The curving of the image in Perspex can be likened to the geometric optics of the eye, a retinal view is imposed on the landscape. I intervene in the visual field producing an oblique image that cuts across the landscape disrupting the natural visual order.  Continuing the tradition of taking visual devices into the landscape, the images projected on the screen of the camera obscura or the optical superimposition of images traced on paper using a camera lucida, the Perspex similarly constitutes an attempt to order nature.  Through this process distance becomes proximal, the landscape is brought closer, it’s relationship is corporeal.  The image of landscape is framed and can be likened to the enclosure of the garden.  The landscaped garden with its enclosures of 'natural' wilderness and statuesque trees epitomizes the desire for the ideal represented through the aesthetic of the picturesque.

website - www.sonyarobinson.wordpress.com
email - sonyarobinson_uk@yahoo.co.uk

Zita Saffrette - Sweden: Salt Water on Film

I work with analogue photography and alternative photographic processes, and within the landscape.  The process of realising an image is key: in "Sweden: Salt Water on Film" the camera was partly submerged in the Baltic Sea so that the film emulsion was affected by the seawater.  It is in this combination of elements - light and water - that I am exploring the desire for closeness with the natural world (as an unconscious symbiotic yearning) and our distance from it (the natural world as fundamentally uncaring).  Much of this work takes place in the northern countries: Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

website - www.zitasaffrette.moonfruit.com
email - zitasaffrette@outlook.com

Soeren Schuhmacher - Backdrop

This image is part of my recent work "Die Entzauberung" (Disenchantment), which takes it's title from a lecture by Max Weber in 1917, where he examines the cultural rationalization and devaluation of mysticism apparent in modern society. All images in this work originate from different archives and create a vision of the arctic region.

This image is a detail from a bigger image, showing a person standing in front of arctic backdrop, made shortly before the actual expedition. The arctic backdrop is only noticeable when looking closely, which allows the person to shift between proximity and distance.

The work is accompanied by a quote from Robert McGhee: These stories, the true and the false, have gradually accumulated to form the vision of a distant and fantastic Arctic as seen through the window of Western culture. [...] This Arctic is not so much a region as a dream: the dream of a unique, unattainable and compellingly attractive world. It is the last imaginary place.

website - www.soeren-schuhmacher.de
email - hello@soeren-schuhmacher.de

Ryan Smith - Southern Reach

Broadcast media in the form of television and radio has altered social behaviour via vicarious conditioning; a rich history of technological advances have transformed our domestic environment. The material elements of this infrastructure, specifically that of terrestrial broadcasting networks, are rendered unseen within the environment of the everyday. By cataloguing these isolated transmitters, an emphasis is placed on both their physical form, and the invisible network; allowing us to contemplate the systems and structures that have engendered such a profound alteration of our social environment. Supplying Yorkshire and parts of Derbyshire with their television and radio signals, the Emley Moor transmitter is the main supporter of a Terrestrial broadcasting network. To reach more remote and inaccessible areas the transmitter uses ‘gap fillers’, or relay stations as a means of boosting the signal; Southern Reach documents a portion of this network.

website - ryanjsmithphoto.com
email - ryanjsmithphoto@gmail.com

Katie Sturgess - Discrete & Continuous

The photograph since its creation has had the ability to bewilder and confuse. Sturgess uses these qualities to re-articulate an understanding of photography at a time of transition due to emerging digital technologies.

These pixels are not born of a computer. If we explore the surface of the image, the floating plane reveals its strings and fixings. Shot completely on 120 film, this is an analogue pixel illusion. From the series ‘Discrete & Continuous’ this image was photographed in the Skjálfandi bay, Northern Iceland. Iceland’s diverse landscapes provided an ever-changing backdrop for which to create this still life illusion, a process that failed more often than not, due to extreme weather conditions.

Katie Sturgess is a graduate of Sheffield Hallam University (BA Hons Photography) and Goldsmiths College, UoL (MA Photography & Electronic Arts).

website - www.katiesturgess.com
email - sturgesskatie@gmail.com

Andras Szabo - Photopullution

Day and Night have been complementing each other since our species exists, however, with the invention of artificial light this correlation lost its convergence, as darkness remains just a rare phenomenon in our modern life. Through my project I attempt to depict this state of perpetual exposure to light, where night becomes just an extension of the day.  

website - www.andrasszabo.com
email - contact@andrasszabo.com

Guillaume Tomasi - Malartic, QC

The ongoing project “Postcards from nowhere” results from a feeling I had during a road-trip in Abitibi. Through thousands kilometers, I had the sensation that I was stagnating while I’m driving on these long straight roads. By entering more and more in these similar landscapes and villages, I began to lose little by little my landmarks. This overwhelming likeness forced me to track for every details to escape this mental confusion.

The captured pictures become a way to establish a link between these large areas. Through their accumulation, they establish the identity of a place that exists only in my head, and they invite the viewer to imagine a story for this new fictional region in the middle of nowhere.

website - www.guillaumetomasi.com
email - hello@guillaumetomasi.com

Mira Varg - Solar Wind

Mira Varg is researching the extensive power of human mind; what allows us to see the recesses of the different ‘dimensions’ that surround us. Her practice revolves around art that creates occurrences that challenge our perception and understanding of our normal reality.

Her work revolves around creating abstract and surreal imagery, sculptures and installations, through experimental techniques and methods. Through combining objects and symbols, of which the outside world would not think to link, she creates her alternative universe. She has often asked herself; why we care to escape reality, why we need to create different worlds, and why are we never satisfied with the one where we stand.
On further thinking, she realise that all of these worlds are still connected, and together make our complete reality as we know it.

website - www.miravarg.com
email - mira.varg@gmail.com

Brian Whalley - Squall approaching shore (Fourier landscape 1: View south-west from (delusions.beauty.shade), 17/09/15, 13.03 UTC)

As a geomorphologist I am interested in the formation of landscapes, their geology and development over time. I also have an active involvement in education and in the psychology of understanding images and visualising geomorphology.

The main title is obvious but the sub-title (part of its metadata) specifies that, aside from the horizon, the image has outline curves, potentially specified by Fourier series, tones help to provide depth and perspective, variations in optical density define ‘mood’. The view specifies direction from the image capture point, the three words (delusions.beauty.shade) define its location (see website what3words) and hence geology and geomorphology. The date and time specify unique situations but imply changes over time; past geology and future environments.

email - b.whalley@sheffield.ac.uk

Darcy White - Vanvoise National Park, Saint-Martin-de-Belleville, France, 2015.

Taken from the elevated and detached perspective of a moving ski lift this shot serves as a reminder that the so-called 'pristine' landscapes of northern places are also peopled. The location, in the southern third of France and not far from the Italian boarder, might also make us question where exactly the north is.

email - d.white@shu.ac.uk

Patrick Wichert - Horizon - Drawn

"If I was absolutely convinced that the canvas was finished, I wouldn't give it a glance. It is only its shortcomings that fascinate me. In these I can see the possibilities of a more accurate metaphor: I can feel all that has escaped me. And it is the consequent sense of the near impossibility of the task which allows me to take pleasure in the little that I have temporarily achieved"
Berger, John. “Painting a Landscape.” Selected Essays. Ed. Geoff Dyer. London: Bloomsbury P, 2001. 214. Print.

I have always been enjoying drawing and walking in equal measures, while photography affords me the time to think. This image was created in winter and as light was receding fast. A strenuous walk was drawing to a close on a cold day, now heading downhill into the valley below.

email - p.wichert@shu.ac.uk

Joe Wilkins - Between Humber and Holderness

A study of the permanently transient space between the advancing North Sea and receding coastline of Holderness.

From a series of photographs made over five consecutive days in February 2017 at locations that will soon be - or have been entirely - lost to the sea.

website - www.joe-wilkins.co.uk
email - jrcwilkins(at)hotmail.co.uk

Robert Willim - Non-location SEL001

 The images of the Selkonen-series are based on video shot in the area around Taivalkoski, in Northeastern Finland. The area is famous for locations of the literary worlds evoked by late author Kalle Päätalo, and the word Selkonen (wilderness, outback or remote land) recur in his literary works.

The Selkonen-series is inspired by the way imaginary and fictional worlds are entangled with concrete geographical locations, and the images of the series consist of interweaved visual layers from several locations in northern Finland that have been transmuted using digital and analog techniques. Everything from light reflections to the limitations of various file formats have left media-specific traces and influenced the transmutation process of the images, hereby making the interplay between enhancement and distortion intrinsic to the series. The images  become part of an imaginary geography of the area in Northeastern Finland referred to as Selkonen.

Robert Willim is an artist based in Sweden and Finland. He also works as Associate Professor of European Ethnology and lecturer in Digital Cultures at Lund University, Sweden. 

website - www.robertwillim.com
email - robert.willim@gmail.com

Ian Wright - Layered

I am a landscape photographer based on the borders between North Wales and England.  I spend a lot of time exploring the landscapes of these regions as well as their cultural identity.  I am often drawn to Snowdonia, a unique environment that characterises the toughness and isolation of North Wales.  

This image is taken from near the East end of Llyn Ogwen and looks down the Ogwen valley taking in the slopes of Pen yr Ole Wen and Y Garn amongst others.  It is part of a series of work through which I am exploring the idea of bringing the high peaks toward the viewer by focusing not on the general landscape, but on the slopes of the mountains and the way they cross and intersect.  These result in almost abstract compositions which show a new side to these often-photographed locations.

website - www.finwrightphotography.co.uk
email - finwright@googlemail.com