Art Wolfe – photography and art

Art Wolfe is one of the most important photographers of today. The Schleswig City Museum is showing the world's first retrospective of the American artist from June 3rd to October 30th, 2016 under the title “The Earth is my Witness”. The Schleswig-Holstein Journal, the magazine of the Schleswig-Holstein newspaper publisher, presents Art Wolfe's best photos in a series written by me. On July 9, 2016 my article about Art Wolfe's detailed photo of a Buddhist temple in Japan appeared:

Whether photography is art or a purely visual, documentary medium is always controversially discussed. Art Wolfe, however, is undeniably an artist: “My personal style is rooted in painting and in my painting, design and art history studies at the end of the 1970s,” he writes in the afterword to his life’s work book Earth Is My Witness. “I pay attention to surface structures and lines, positive and negative space, rhythms and patterns. Today, my favorite photos are ones that could have been taken anywhere and you don’t even recognize anything in them.”

Art Wolfe explained this trend towards abstraction in his work to me using the example of his photograph of the Shingon Temple in Japan: “This is a motif that I would not have photographed a few years ago because I simply would not have recognized it. The orange would have been much too bright for my color perception back then. But I am in a constant process of maturing and open to inspiration, and so I see things that were previously closed to me. While filming my TV series Travels to the Edge, I was on my way to interview a monk when I passed this magnificent orange wall. I made a mental note to come back here after the interview. Then I abandoned that idea, turned around, took a quick picture, and walked on to the monk who was standing in the snow in wooden slippers, waiting for me. When I returned, the scene was disenchanted: the wind had picked up and the snow had blown from the maple branches. The black branches in front of the orange wall alone weren't enough; Only together with the white snow does the picture radiate the liveliness and movement of Japanese ink painting.”

“The art of photography,” as Art Wolfe once aptly put it elsewhere, “is not about taking a picture of something strikingly beautiful, that would be too easy. It is about capturing the essence of a scene with full awareness of its artistic significance.. "