David Politzer

My relationship to landscape art is conflicted. I recognize that I get substantial creative motivation from being outside, and I am, admittedly, seduced and inspired by all the tropes: sunsets, vistas and waterfalls. At the same time, I am hyperconscious of cliché and staying contemporary. This tension manifests visually and conceptually in my work as I struggle to “locate” myself within the traditions of landscape art making. When You’re Out There is an evolving collection of video and photographic works that use the tropes of landscape art as a point of critical departure.

Central to my series is this dilemma: Humans want to own, control and understand nature, but we also want it to be wild and unpredictable. We want nature to be contained and safe so we can observe and enjoy it, but not at the expense of permanently changing it’s behavior or it’s way of being. The various murals, stuffed animals, decorations and advertisements in my series represent this dilemma in that, often I find them in close proximity to their “real” counterparts. We are left to contemplate and compare the facsimile with the in-situ terrain. In this match-up, how can a random bunch of rocks and animals compete with these idealized, ordered and easily digestible representations?

David Politzer is a Houston, Texas based photographer.
To view more of David's work, please visit his website.
David is a 2012 Houston Center for Photography Fellowship Award winner.