Personal Work: 2004 - 2009
In addition to commercial assignments (advertising photography and editorial photography for magazines in Switzerland and abroad) I spent a lot of time on the road or in the darkroom. While professional photography vanished into the digital black box, I was drawn back into the darkroom for my own work. An alchemical time travel in the dark: Gold chloride, silver nitrate, platinum and palladium salts, oxalic acid, amidol, and pyrogallol. Experiments without end. It was the essay to approach the subject of landscape photography with a fresh, contemporary view and old technique.
The photographs were taken in the Alps, the Pyrenees, in the South of France and in Brittany. These are contact prints, mostly 8x10", on silver gelatin paper, partly on Kodak Azo, and platinum-palladium prints, as well as experimental processes that I had developed myself.
„…the landscape genre dialectic, which stems from the limited depiction of the limitless.“
– Diedrich Diederichsen in: James Benning, decoding fear : [on the occasion of the exhibitions: James Benning Decoding Fear, Kunsthaus Graz, Universalmuseum Joanneum, Graz, 07.03. - 01.06.2014 ; James Benning, Kunstverein in Hamburg, 24.01. - 22.03.2015] / [Hrsg. Peter Pakesch ; Bettina Steinbrügge], p.105, translation Amy Patton