To pick up a stone

“In photographic studies, Den Boer examines the experience of scale, perspective and spatiality through an eclectic variety of images of mountains, rocks and stones. Time, light and distance determine the experience of something as massive as a mountain, but can the expression of a mountain also be discovered in a close-up, or even in a single stone? The diversity of her images show how changeable our view of a seemingly static object can be." – publisher The Eriskay Connection

To pick up a stone stems from my first photo book Anchors. Walking through deserts I picked up some stones; I wanted to carry a piece of the landscape with me. In later journeys, I brought these stones with me to photograph in mountain landscapes. With my camera I went looking for ‘the mountain in the stone’. I also photographed the mountains themselves with their constant ‘changing faces’ and silent presence. Back home, I traveled again, but this time within the landscapes of my analog negatives. By zooming in on the images I had previously made, I looked again at what I had already seen, discovering new landscapes.

Why do we pick up stones? Perhaps to connect with something that has existed for a long time, and to remind us of our relationship with the earth, to be here and now. With this work I want to invite to connect to something that’s very old, to slow down, to be still, to look and look again.

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