On Landscape
Landscape means framed nature. The term evokes archetypal places where one can feel at home, a universal space to encounter oneself. Curiosity, understood as the tension between sight and desire, allows the body to transform into a unique landscape. Tracing the contours of a beloved’s skin, for example, reframes us and evokes the coastline between inside and outside and discloses an intimate landscape where one can lose oneself in ecstasy. We can carry landscapes within ourselves just as landscapes can sustain us. We need this poetic fusion from time to time to insure us against no-man’s-land, to find answers or refresh identity.
My photography determines the scale of a landscape by its distance to paradise. Some images translate a landscape’s notations of dusk and dawn, seasonal cycles, traces of tides, the power of storm and wind, the magic of light and humidity. Other images are born from accidents and unknown visitors – inverting the impacts of civilisation where it ends. I know there is another universe to share, invisible to the naked human eye. I find comfort in this uncertainty. It seems part of an urge to be naked under new stars, again.
My colours respond to simple melodies or questions written up in the sky, simultaneously exploring the deep time of inner and outer space, moving from the closing end of the known territory into The Open: Finis Terrae.
Why do we love to be by the sea? Why do we feel so drawn to the woods and the mountains?
I like to think my cameras have ears and to listen with my eyes.
Tom Fecht