Olaf Otto Becker Livres

Following Broken Line , a prizewinning portrait of the coast of Greenland, Olaf Otto Becker (born in Travemünde, 1959) turns his attention to the interior of the island in his new series, Above Zero . Second only to Antarctica, Greenland has the largest inland ice surfaces in the world. Becker's spectacular portraits of this region are taken during physically strenuous, sometimes life-threatening treks among glacial crevasses and melting ice floes, with a cumbersome large-format camera. His photo studies draw out the overwhelming beauty of this icy landscape, while documenting their present dust and rust in the air form black, crusty deposits, which, in conjunction with global warming, accelerate the melting of the ice sheets--with what will probably be inevitable, catastrophic results. Becker warns that even in these uninhabited regions, human actions can have fatal consequences.

Olaf Otto Becker, born in 1959, worked for almost four years and covered thousands of miles by boat creating these photographs of the coastline of Greenland. The resulting images, made in the clear light of the midsummer night over long exposures, are worth the effort. Almost shadowless neo-romantic dreamscapes, they are unrealistically beautiful. Becker sometimes waits days for the right image or condition to appear in order to produce a single image--a process that leaves him with only about 25 photographs per year. Though visually diverse, all of the pictures share the contemplative character of their creator. Becker, who was once a painter, doesn't photograph scenery: He builds compositions, using his eye and his patience to develop a work of melancholic beauty, in the powerful iconography of the nineteenth-century landscape. He has exhibited widely in Europe, and his previous monograph was short-listed for the Rencontres D'Arles Book Award.

In his Habitat series, Olaf Otto Becker (born 1959) presents idyllic dreamlike places--paradisical tableaus from the jungles of Malaysia and Indonesia. (Romantic floodplains, tree trunks slung with liana vines, niches for countless life forms--these are the untouched tropical rainforests of legend.) Even the temperate rainforest of Redwood National Parks in California seems reassuringly intact: the mammoth trees are surviving thanks to rigorous conservation measures. By contrast, in the second half of his series Becker shows what happens across the globe when international corporations clear large tracts of land and giant areas of barren, treeless terrain result. Erosion also does its work, and no life can survive in these places. In the final section, Becker presents the artificial forests conceived by various international architects to insert greenery into urban space.

Seit seinem ersten Besuch im Jahr 2003 zieht es den Fotografen Olaf Otto Becker (* 1959 in Travemünde) in die Arktis. Ausgehend von Ilulissat, eine der ältesten Siedlungen Westgrönlands, begibt sich Becker mit seinem Boot und seiner Kamera immer wieder aufs Eismeer, um Eisbergen zu begegnen. Wie schwimmende Skulpturen ragen die weißen Riesen aus dem Wasser, in dem sich ihre vielfältigen Formen majestätisch spiegeln. In ihrer stillen Erhabenheit schwingt dabei immer auch Zerbrechlichkeit mit, wie er selbst zu bedenken gibt: »Eisberge sind für mich aus sich selbst heraus entstandene, wundervolle und vergängliche Skulpturen, aber auch gleichzeitig natürliche Denkmäler und Mahnmale, die für den fortschreitenden Veränderungsprozess des Klimas stehen, den wir Menschen nun zum ersten Mal in der Geschichte unseres Planeten maßgeblich mit beeinflussen.« OLAF OTTO BECKER (*1959, Travemünde) studierte Kommunikationsdesign in Augsburg und Philosophie und Politikwissenschaft in München. Seine Fotos finden sich weltweit in Ausstellungen und sind in wichtigen Sammlungen vertreten. Bei Hatje Cantz erschienen Broken Line (2017), Above Zero (2009), Under the Nordic Light (2011), Reading the Landscape (2014) und Ilulissat (2017).