To the Bozar this evening to visit an excellent European landscape photography exhibition entitled Sense of Place. Some 160 photographs, taken by some 40 photographers, provide a composite portrait of Europe, divided between the North (the Channel, the North Sea, the Nordic and Baltic Sea areas), the Centre (East, West , Austria, Hungary) and the South (the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Eastern Mediterranean). There were many beautiful and striking images, from Olafur Eliasson’s ‘Horizons’ to Irene Kung’s carefully-lighted protraits of trees and waves, but if I had to single out just one image to keep, it would be Per Bak Jensen’s extraordinarily lyrical Forest. Like Kung’s work, the photograph seems almost like a painting. Indeed, it reminded me strongly of the work of Léon Spilliaert (picture). Jensen is famous for never manipulating an image, once taken, so the effect is all down to composition, timing, lighting, exposure, the lens and, I suspect a great deal of patience. This exhibition is well worth seeing also because many of the giant images, including Jensen’s, simply don’t work when reproduced in a book or on a poster.
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