I am officially in love with Bart Michiels’ Verdun 1916, Le Mort Homme. It makes me want to jump inside and experience for a day (or two or three or 10) the vivid green grass and fog-soaked sky that are the photograph’s only subjects. The saturation of color in the lower half of the piece and the complete lack of it in the upper thrills my minimalist-starved soul and if ever there was a piece of art that I would marry, this one would be it.
Okay I hyperbolize (a bit), but suffice it to say that Human Nature: Recent European Landscape Photography is a very fine exhibit indeed. Curators at The Nelson-Atkins have brought together an enticing feast of landscape photography by artists like Michiels, Marc Räder and Massimo Vitali. But the subjects are not just of scenery alone. Several of these large-scale pieces are of populated landscapes, and visitors to the exhibit will be hard-pressed not to wish they were sunning themselves on the beach or trekking through a snow-covered mountain along with the people in the photographs. How could they not when gazing at such beautifully represented pieces of the world?
Take Vitali’s Viareggio Tuffo, for example. Sunbathers on a sandy beach is a sight many of us have seen and or experienced before (though perhaps not on a gorgeous Italian sandy beach populated with gorgeous Italians). But there is a dreamyness to this landscape that is absolute perfection. The cloudless sky complements the 50s Technicolor look of bathing suits and umbrellas and bronzed skin crowding the beach underneath. From afar the photo looks digitally-enhanced, but up close it seems just possible that Northern Italians are lucky enough to experience days that look exactly like this one. Oh, to be them!