Photographer MAGNUS DENKER

Looking West Thinking East (2022)

I have worked with landscape photography for more than twenty years, and my pictures most often depict the peripheral landscape. In my latest project, "Looking West Thinking East", the pictures mostly describe the sea and the sky. I've elaborated and concentrated the images, and present these abstract landscapes as colored horizontal lines. Everything is restful and no ripples are visible on the water. The lines are still but I sometimes sense some vibrations in the color. If I observe the images from a certain distance, a distinct landscape will appear in most of the cases. If I go nearer, the images are dissolved in a muddle of horizontal lines. The project has continued over several years and now comprises more than 4,000 pictures. Most often I've stood on the same spot: the T-boardwalk at Ribersborg beach in Malmö, pointing my camera at Copenhagen in the west. As a rule, I've photographed at dusk and in bad weather - which means that more photos are taken in fall and winter than in summer. Processing my photos in Photoshop and seeing these lines, I came to think of Japanese garden culture with its subtly rolling lines drawn in the gravel. A simple and meditative pattern which often gets to symbolize clouds and water in the Zen tradition.