EAT SOME MAGMA: A Return to Nature in Contemporary Photography
by Aaron Schuman
Summer 2019

This article was originally published in Unseen Magazine - Issue #7: Summer 2019

Several weeks ago my mother came to visit me in England. It was her chance to escape – for just a few days – from what had been a long and stressful year. As we drove away from the airport, and as our initial small-talk subsided, we soon found ourselves stuck in traffic. Turning away from me, my mother gazed silently out of the passenger-side window.

It was approaching mid-summer after one of the wettest Junes on record, and I realised she was staring into a small, untended woodland by the roadside, glistening with fat, damp leaves. 'I didn't know there were so many maple trees here', she announced. 'And look at all that holly. And elderflower. Wild roses. There's cow parsley; foxgloves; nightshade; honeysuckle; even a chestnut tree.' She took a deep breath before letting out a long, primal sigh. I realised she wasn't looking at this forgotten patch of unspoiled nature just to pass the time – she was inhaling it wholeheartedly, ingesting it deep within herself.

'Look all over. Extract and alter the natural elements that surround you in the constructed reality. Eat some Magma', writes Elena Aya Bundurakis in a statement accompanying her ongoing Eating Magma series. 'Nature (primal/modern/post nature) is always imbued with mystery,' she continues. 'It is about breathing. Eat and smell and touch. I am looking into 4 Fs: my Flesh, my Food, Fauna and Flora. Learning about less imagined versions of the surrounding world…'


Like a number of photographic artists who have risen to prominence in recent years – Awoiska van der Molen and Maisie Cousins come immediately to mind – Bundurakis' work does not investigate the natural landscape with a coolly distant or analytic eye. Unconcerned with order, composure or clarity, her approach embraces the deeply visceral experience of engaging directly with nature itself via the immediacy of the senses. Bringing together a seemingly random assortment of images – over-ripe blossom, rotting tree roots, gelatinous fungi, exposed flesh, layered sandstone amorphously undulating over itself, or milky silt-rich river water gurgling downstream – Eating Magma dives head first into nature's messy, murky mystery, allowing it to seep deeply into one's pores.

'Nature unadulterated and unimproved by man – is simply chaos,' argued photographer Edward Weston in a transcription of his 1922 lecture, Random Notes on Photography. 'In fact, the camera proves that nature is crude and lacking in arrangement…One has only to scan exhibition walls to conclude that most photographic landscapes, unless they be mere fragments, could have been better done using some other medium. This being so, they should never have been made at all. The conclusion from all this must be that photography is much better suited to subjects amenable to arrangement or subjects already co-ordinated by man.'

Such a bold pronouncement – that photography is the wrong tool with which to study the natural world – comes as quite a shock, particularly from one of the medium's most influential practitioners, who himself couldn't resist nature's visual lure from time to time. Yet it reveals an underlying insecurity that has haunted photographers for nearly a century; that there's something about the landscape – perhaps it's its chaotic unruliness, or perhaps it's simply considered to be too twee, too obvious, too old-fashioned, too unfashionable or too picturesque – that just doesn't sit well with photography, and therefore its depiction should be discouraged.

Even the great Ansel Adams advised that photographers turn their attention away from the beauty of nature to focus instead on nature's relationship to humanity, writing in 1943 (only several years after producing his celebrated images of the American wilderness): 'Documentation – in the present social interpretation of the term – will burst into full flower at the moment of peace. Herein lies the magnificent opportunity of all photographic history. Here is where the camera can be related to a vast constructive function; the revelation of a new world as it is born and grows into maturity. I believe that the highest function of post-war photography will be to relate the world of nature to the world of man, and man to men.'

Adams' prediction proved relatively true. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century – and well into the twenty-first – the predominant focus within photographic culture shifted further towards social landscapes than natural ones, evolving into movements such as New Topographics, and more recently those exploring the concept of the Anthropocene. As Robert Adams – one of the best-known pioneers of the New Topographics movement – once explained, 'I started in the mid-60s taking nature pictures, pure. But I finally had to admit that the Garden was off limits.'

Yet looking at works by many of today's emerging artists, it seems there is a budding resurgence of photographic practitioners committed to engaging with 'the Garden' whilst simultaneously advancing the representational possibilities of nature. In Michael Lundgren's Geomancy, there are hints of Weston's influence in his intimately precise interrogations of fragments within the American desert. But rather than attempting to tame or arrange their chaotic state like Weston did, Lundgren exploits the awkward roughness of the stones, bones and sand that cross his path. 'Whereas landscape photography has long been devoted to expansive vistas and grandiosity,' explains a statement by his gallery, 'Lundgren focuses on the unseen and the unaccountable…[his images] are confrontational in their strange, stark beauty, creating an intellectual counterpoint to our idea of nature as humanity's benefactor or Eden – a reminder that nature is indifferent to us, but we cannot afford to be indifferent to nature.'

In these words there are certainly echoes of Adams' 1943 forecast, though many other contemporary practitioners have taken up a similar approach to the natural world, applying techniques and strategies far from those championed by Adams himself. In Monuments, Douglas Mandry explores the transience of dissipating glaciers in his native Switzerland, employing two quite off-piste approaches. First, using lithographic processes, he prints archival photographs from 1930s mountaineering expeditions directly onto canvases cut from 'glacier blankets'. These geotextile coverings – bearing the wear-and-tear of their original use – are laid over glaciers throughout Switzerland to cool and protect the ice, slowing down the rapid melting process.

Secondly, Mandry makes 'ice photograms' in the darkroom by replacing the photographic negative with melting ice from the Aletsch Glacier, before printing the resulting image onto glass plates. In the artist's own words, 'Working on a project which chronicles the disappearing glaciers, I wanted to use a direct medium which preserved the subject…It's basically a condensed version of the whole process of glaciers disappearing, since the ice melts in only a few minutes in the heat of the lab. It's this movement that I try to capture.'

Elsewhere, Marie Clerel also abandons the traditional approach of using photography to reproduce an image of a particular subject, moment or event, choosing instead to imbed the subject, moment and event directly into the photographic materials themselves. In Midi, Clerel exposes a piece of light-sensitive paper to the sun every day at noon, which in turn makes a cyanotype of various shades – a deep blue print if it's sunny, pale blue if it's cloudy – which she then groups together in tightly-knit grids of 28, 30 or 31, creating abstract records of the weather for an entire calendar month.

In her Lunaisons project, Clerel exposes several exhausted pieces of photographic paper to a supermoon (when a full moon coincides with the moon's closest approach to Earth in its orbit), and then lines up the resulting prints in an ethereal, delicately toned sequence. Beyond mere depictions, these photographic objects are bathed directly in a night of super-moonlight in its purest form.

But purity – photographic or otherwise – is by no means the only way that artists engage with the landscape today. In an interview prior to their recent exhibition at Foam, artists Persijn Broersen and Margit Lukács described their computer-generated film, Forest on Location, as 'a contemporary fairy tale in which we let a man get lost in his own virtual reality…[He] walks around like a stranger to find his way through the forest, but he increasingly suspects that the forest is not real'. As they explain further, 'More than about nature, this film is an example of what our perception of reality is when we surround ourselves by monitors…[W]e constructed the forest in such a way that it disappears, and branches off more and more into a virtual reality.'

In a virtual wilderness constructed from photographs made in Poland's Bialowieza Forest – among the largest remaining parts of an immense primeval forest that once spanned the European plain – the film begins with the protagonist enveloped by a vibrant woodland, which then progressively disintegrates into a hauntingly pixelated wasteland that's been digitally stripped of detail, order, colour and coherence. In this sense, perhaps today it's not nature itself that is chaotic or 'crude and lacking in arrangement' as Weston concluded, but instead humanity's attempts at replicating, improving upon and experiencing it through sophisticated visual illusions and contemporary image-generating technology.


The evening before my mother left England, we took the dog out for a long walk. Rambling through several fields, and into the shady darkness of a local vale flanked by rocky cliffs overgrown with tree-roots, moss and ferns, my mother compulsively shot close-up pictures – hundreds of them – on her pocket-sized point-and-shoot. The journey, which normally takes about thirty minutes, lasted nearly three hours, with her stopping every few steps to inspect each branch, leaf, rock, flower and stem we came across with her lens. Again, I realised that – like the dog, who scampered erratically throughout the undergrowth, fervently sniffing at each tree-trunk and patch of earth; and like many contemporary photographers, who are collectively revitalising the medium's engagement with the natural world in new and visceral ways – she too was consuming the surrounding landscape, but this time through her camera.

'Thank goodness for folks who aren't interested in big views,' Robert Adams once said, 'Maybe that's one of the most lovable things about dogs – you wake up to a spectacular sunrise and what they want to do is nose around the ground.' Or in other words: 'Look all over. Extract and alter the natural elements that surround you in the constructed reality. Eat some Magma.'