Andrea Gnam
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Book review of "Under Skies of Blue and Grey" in Photonews 9/2015
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| Forest edge, unhurried, grove, clearing, coppice, wayside, woods, billowing stalks, flecks of light—unearthing a number of half-forgotten terms is necessary in order to capture the sober yet lovingly portrayed atmosphere expressed by Amin El Dib in his sky blue linen bound book Under Skies of Blue and Grey. Featuring raised white lettering on the cover and a grey liner, the book, published by Peperoni Verlag in Berlin, immediately conjures up images of the cloud-streaked skies of many a childhood summer. Amin El Dib explores the color-rich counterpart: the cultivated landscape of his surrounding environment beneath the sky, interspersed with meadows and woodlands. The sky, however, only makes an explicit appearance in one of the images—like a paneled ceiling interwoven with contrails. The book starts off with an image of a meadow showing a shaded area in the foreground, which the eye must climb over to then be lured into the depths of a seemingly endless expanse of a slightly hilly pastureland, following a barely discernable line. Bent stalks create the impression of a shaft moving toward an elevated vanishing point that suddenly disappears in the upper seventh of the image. The colors shift slightly and other grass formations spread through the upper layers of the image as undulating bands of color. This precise visual work is characteristic of El Dib’s photographic views of nature, its interplay of colors and cultivation through agricultural use. Elongated, rectangular fields with a variety of vegetation, meandering country lanes and pasture fencing provide the camera a geometry of surfaces, generating a unique kind of photographic “color field painting” with saturated, earthly colors often drenched in moisture. El Dib’s photographs are, with the exception of the solitary image at the beginning, configured as image pairs, which seemingly incorporate and sustain one another’s structural elements both vertically and horizontally. Certain aspects of this juxtaposition are striking, such as the rhythm of densification and dissolution: thus, in a image of tree trunks on the left, shattered branches, and scattered tree limbs broken apart by lightning or a storm are piled up like parts of churning propeller blades, whereas the image on the right shows tree trunks cut by a chainsaw resting in a clearing, in the middle of an oval-shaped patch of snow, surrounded by other concentric stripes of snow. In between these the forest floor with stones and rotten leaves is visible. Or a summertime image of the lust foliage of a walnut tree in an orchard meadow is contrasted with the wintertime image of the middle of a dense forest, twig branches sinking under the weight of the snow. The photographs are held together by a vista just above the center of the image that sets up a correspondence: through a sparse spot in the crown of the walnut tree, a section of bright sky can be seen; three deep black trunks almost in the same area of the image on the opposite page contrast with the pristine, white snow. Some aspects might seem symbolic but this is not the case: two barbed wires that structure an image horizontally. In the lower third of the photograph, a rusty wire and a new galvanized one meet halfway, making one think of finger wrestling, whereas a second wire, dividing the pastureland from the forest in the upper third of the image, is almost hard to make out at first given the barely discernable difference in color to the background. In addition to the distribution of space, the compartments of color, and the wind-blown, clumped together masses of fallen leaves or remnants of snow, it is traces of man’s presence that can be followed when examining the images more closely. His impact can be found in nearly every image in the form of barbed wire, elevated blinds for observing the wild, service roads, stamped-down grass or even red-white barrier tape. Andrea Gnam, 2015 in Photonews 9/2015 |
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