HOLGER MARTIN | INTERVIEW | 29
Shinkansen Station, 2003, Archival Print on HahnemĂźhle Photo Rag, 13 x 35.5 cm / 82.5 x 30.5 cm
has already retreated. At the other end, much of humankind’s involvement is very direct, when we shape the environment to suit our needs, and a lot of landscapes that we see as natural are not that at all. There is the added complication that humankind is of course also part of nature. When talking about raw landscapes, I am referring to landscapes that are not picturesque in the traditional sense. Some landscapes that are shaped through events unrelated to human intervention appear quite industrial, for example.
What it is about these locations that you are trying to convey to the viewer? My interest in the photography of raw landscapes lies in showing the traces that humankind and natural processes leave in the environment. However, the actions or events that led to the formation of those traces are rarely still visible, such as the fire caused by a camper, which devastated a Patagonian forest or the volcanic eruption that blackened the normally clean glacial ice. The visible traces are then stand-ins for what is not directly visible anymore and I have been concentrating on this aspect of landscape photography in a lot of my work.