Michael Reisch’s New Landscapes

Sara Leach

Michael Reisch’s book “New Landscapes,” is full of amazing photos that grasp the viewer’s attention like any other. Reisch’s images, for the most part are of vast landscapes; mountains, cliffs, lakes, rock formations: anything he finds interesting. I noticed quickly that Reisch’s images all incorporate the amazing natural converging lines in the hills or mountains that he photographs. The many estonsing lines, take your view and guide you throughout the whole of the image, creating a dramatic and dynamic image.

Besides his amazing talent to capture the natural formation of the landscape around us, Reisch is also able to portray the light in his images in an astonishing way. For instance, in many of his images you are able to see the shadows of the clouds floating overhead. At first you might not realize what the scattered shadows are because the clouds are not pictured in the scene, making his images that much more dynamic and interesting to interpreted.

Another thing I love about Reisch’s work, is his ability to capture the detailed texture in the landscape he photographs. Whether it be in a vast or zoomed in image of the nature around him, Reisch is able to capture the light, texture, and feeling in each of his eye opening images. 

Bernhard Fuchs’s Woodlands

Sara Leach

            The first page of the book starts out with an excerpt from Bernhard Fuchs about the landscape of his childhood and the landscape in the pages to follow:

“The landscape in which I was born and raised is characterized by expanses of hills marked by woodlands in varying arrangements. My experiences of the colours, wind, light, precipitation, and change in season that make up these landscapes combined to create a reality that I later understood as “everydayness.” The landscape and its woodlands, observed on the horizon from my childhood home, formed the limits of my world, and I remember my astonishment at discovering, over and again, something new past each string of hills and each forest. Today too, when I observe and traverse the terrain of these woodlands, I experience them as a continuous story. Often a difficult day may be transformed into a distance that is at once inspiring and consoling.”

Fuch’s like us, for this class, photograph what is around us and what we find interesting. The landscapes he photographed for this book are even very similar to the landscape of state college and the area surrounding it; wide open fields with patches of forest lining them. If you did not know any better, you could even say Fuch’s was photographing State College itself.

            Fuch’s images are of the land itself, lacking a human involvement, and for the most part, containing a repetitive set of colors: dark greens, pale yellows, white greys, and occasionally a pop of bright green, but rarely venturing from form his norm. For me, the most successful aspects of Fuch’s images are the great sense of depth and depth of field that he able to capture in his images. The atmospheric fogging that is apparent in his images, not only the real fog that he often includes sets a mood in his images that pulls the viewer in and makes it much more than a simple and generic image of trees and a field. My favorite images of his though are the images in the winter, where, for the most part, the entire frame is white with the small but dramatic pops of black where the trees sit, covered in snow.

            Fuch’s work for me is inspiring because he takes a pretty common and simple landscape, and captures it in a way that is able to express his feeling when standing in that very place; as he “experience[s] them as a continuous story.”