Landscape in Transition I




A Sad Winter's Tale Unfolding


series of 34



2014 - 2016

This is a personal story, a series of black and white imagery that came into being as part of a larger project in the last couple of years in which the landscape I had been photographed for a period of almost nine years, near my home in rural Western Norway, changed from being the object of my fascination into the object of my personal anxiety and despair.

In this period, one of my children fell seriously ill and I spent many a sleepless night haunted by the worst scenarios. While trying to cope with the torment of uncertainty and distress, my father unexpectedly passed away, and my motherly worries got entangled with an overwhelming feeling of loss and grief.

While I always felt very much a part of my natural surroundings and could muse over nature’s wonders of composition and form on my daily journeys walking the dogs, now, I could not really connect any longer with the landscape I loved. It simply refused to communicate anything any longer. Nevertheless, I kept taking photographs because that is what I do and because I needed the landscape to be there, as a fixed point in my increasingly obscuring daily life.

This body of work moves beyond the documentary to explore the possibilities of emotional landscape photography. It is a visual expression of a troubled mind and a yearning heart in which winter appears as the driving force of a nightmarish vision.

  





  

Copyright © 2016 - 18 by Monique de Groot. All Rights Reserved.