Links to order book:
Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg
Oceanscapes – One View – Ten Years
About The Book
Publication Date: Fall 2010German born photographer Renate Aller has been photographing the Atlantic Ocean for over a decade from a single point on the Hamptons’ coastline. Her images capture the infinitely shifting colors and textures of the sky and water, and the beauty and grandeur of the ocean, providing a rich document of what has drawn people to this area for generations. The sublime beauty of this view, which Aller directly connects to the great 19th century German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, is also a metaphor for the landscape of the human emotions. Aller’s viewpoint is static, but the changing weather and light allow for a diverse series of images that open up a vast ‘visual library’ of memories and associations. Printed in Germany, the book captures the subtle mystery of her larger prints and the original oceanscapes.
Co-edited by and including an interview with the artist by German Art Historian Jasmin Seck, and with contributions by Hamburger Kunsthalle Museum’s contemporary art curator Dr. Petra Roettig and New York critic Richard B. Woodward that place Aller’s work both in the context of landscape photography and the history of images of the East End’s southern shore.
Links to order book:
Radius Books
DAP Artbook
Ocean Desert
About The Book
This project by German-born photographer Renate Aller, titled Ocean and Desert, is an extension of the ongoing series and sold-out book oceanscapes (Radius Books, 2010). Aller has continued to make images of the ocean from a single vantage point—for which she is internationally known—but for the last several years, she has also photographed sand dunes in New Mexico and Colorado.
She has now paired the resulting images in a fascinating new series that continues her investigation into the relationship between Romanticism, memory, and landscape in the context of our current socio-political awareness. There is both a visual and visceral relationship between the two bodies of work, as though the minerals of the sand dunes carry the memory of the ocean waters that were there millions of years before. The desert images also capture visitors to the dunes, who engage in beach activities far away from any large body of water. And while these parallel realities are from completely different locations, the simultaneous, multiple activities on the sloping sand hills appears as if layers of different people and activities were choreographed next to rolling waves of the sea.
Aller’s first combination of these images was in book form, for a mammoth hand-made book that was 36 inches wide. The overwhelming success of that object has inspired the new trade copy edition, which is as large a binding that can be mechanically bound, and includes an expanded selection of the work.
Links to order book:
Publisher, Radius Books
Distributor, Artbook DAP
Mountain Interval
About The Book
The latest project from New York–based photographer Renate Aller includes mountain peaks from six continents.These photographs were taken from locations as high as 22,500 feet (adjacent to Mount Everest) to the European glaciers and mountain peaks of her childhood vacations. The subject matter is monumental, yet the images connect the viewer in a way that is not overpowering. Similar to the sand dune images from Ocean | Desert (Radius, 2014), the artist engages us with these giants in all their detail, the veins and textures of the rocks in their constantly transient state. Aller isolates the mountain from its expected surroundings, using and presenting the familiar and the known in an intimate way, relating to parallel realities from different locations, opening up conversations between the different (political) landscapes in which we live.