Gallery on Old Bailey

Schattenkerk lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is a graduate of the revered Gerrit Rietveld Academie and his work is part of a number of private and public collections in Europe as well as the United States.  A selection of the 2008 Hyeres Photo Festival, Gallery on Old Bailey is proud to exhibit Schattenkerk’s work from his Andromeda Strain series. His artist statement is below:

After making many landscape photographs I realized the search for special places is more important than the place itself. The notion of discovery has been always intimately linked to photography. The cliché of the photographer as an explorer of unknown and rough places became a starting point to construct images. I played with the “National Geographic”-language essentially without leaving my hometown. I searched for locations that, after small interventions, could fit in an imaginary travelogue. Using low-budget special effects and lighting I staged natural phenomena and imagery.

To this work made on location I added still-lives constructed in the studio. Referring to nature and scientific photography, the tabletop landscapes create confusion on the overall status of the series. The artificial and the real, and the different sources the image is based on, should be present