BOGDA SHAN (2023)
That such an organic entropy befalls most of what we behold in the world will not surprise us. But images that rest within the surfaces of film negatives may be destroyed because of human neglect. The same neglect vanquishes history, places, and nature. The haunting white glaciers of Bogda Shan (2023), originally documented by the German-Jewish Alpinist Gottfried Merzbacher and reproduced at a grand scale here by Gehbauer, echoes the melancholia inherent to Phantasma.
These mountain scenes, too, like the negatives on which they exist, are in a state of double erasure: the glaciers from a century ago are very likely lost, and the negative itself is doted black by the erosion of natural time, though sped up by a lack of planetary care.
- Kate Brown
That such an organic entropy befalls most of what we behold in the world will not surprise us. But images that rest within the surfaces of film negatives may be destroyed because of human neglect. The same neglect vanquishes history, places, and nature. The haunting white glaciers of Bogda Shan (2023), originally documented by the German-Jewish Alpinist Gottfried Merzbacher and reproduced at a grand scale here by Gehbauer, echoes the melancholia inherent to Phantasma.
These mountain scenes, too, like the negatives on which they exist, are in a state of double erasure: the glaciers from a century ago are very likely lost, and the negative itself is doted black by the erosion of natural time, though sped up by a lack of planetary care.
- Kate Brown
Memories of a place I have never been...Part II, HOTO Gallery
Bogda Shan (2023), MB 1/2 200 x 135 cm, MB3/4 160 x 120 cm, pigment print