51 thoughts on “jorg sundermann – finland”

  1. bobblack

    I dont know why, but when i saw this lovely pic, and that amber light, i thought of 2 things:

    1) finishing at sunset off the piers in Naples, Flordia

    and

    2) George Hoyningen-Huene great photograph from 1930 (http://tinyurl.com/975rny)

    the odd foregrounding and depth-of-field, a delirium and swoon of light, with this blanket of warm cooper tones (sunset and pier boards) with this odd monolithic wing elongates both the pier and our perception….an odd and weird infinity….

    great pic for me to look at after a long, cold weekend…

    ‘to infinity and beyond’ ;)))

    cheers
    bob

  3. david bowen

    ahh MAN THAT BAKES MY CAKE>

    just been traveling through airport things and seen a similar perspective all over the place.. corridors.. white walls.. without half the light mood and beautiful placement..

    love it right now.
    thanks.

  4. Martin Brink

    Don’t know about this one. While I like architecture I’m not a very big fan of this one. Technically speaking it’s good and the mood is there, but I think I’ve been a bit overfed with tilt and shift effects..

    Vasilios,
    Why it was chosen? From my point of view the selected photographs so far have not been similiar at all. This is also what I like about David and burn, to accept different approaches, genres and styles.

  5. Jeff

    This is not, in my opinion, a very good image. Poor focus. Poorly lit. It has nothing to separate it from countless other travel or outdoor images.Bland and rudimentary to be honest.

  6. Vasilios Sfinarolakis

    understood well and clear martin, moreso after the fact than when I wrote my initial comment, but yet, it seems like such a coffee-house photo to me which – in no way trying to offend the author nor the photo nor the person who chose the photo (although I may) – seems a bit trite to place on burn in which the photos have been so diverse and different thus far. Albiet there is a distinctively curious mood, and its an interesting take on the common “shore-balcony” shot, it just seems too commonplace for my tastes.

    anyways, I am off to see the first african-american president be inaugurated. If you respond i’ll try to do so in a timely manner. otherwise, cheers!

  9. Byron

    Jeff, the poorly lit and poorly focused aspects of this shot are what separates it apart from countless other travel or outdoor images. The fuzzy appearance that at first caught my eye off gaurd, made me feel like I was drinking a glass of something warm. Images like these are important, if not important works of art. Maybe David picked this picture because it represents a setting with more feeling than information.

  10. Jim Powers

    I acknowledge I have an unsophisticated eye, but deliberately fuzzy photos have become pervasive and just don’t appeal to me.

  21. david bowen

    in the moment, at the time and just after spending too long in white corridors in gatwick airport it really struck with me.. the polar opposite of what i had just photographed myself.
    looking again this morning.. and i still love it..
    forgetting the fuzzy feel jim, can you not just sink into it?
    i can.

  22. Mike R

    Photographs such as this make you think: you can’t just drink it in and turn the page; if you do you will miss so much.
    My first thought was ‘We seem to be getting a lot of camera-shake photographs here at Burn” (nothing wrong with shake per se). Then I saw the very limited depth of field and my second thought was “So it’s not camera-shake, it’s deliberate”. Another look and I was reminded of the descending tail of a whale; apt for a seaside pier (Finland?). Finally the photograph as a whole: it has a dreamlike quality and is more than the sum of its parts. Works for me: not something that I would usually look at. Thank you and congratulations Jorge. Thank you Burn.

    Mike.

  23. abele quaregna

    interesting interpretation… but I find the out of focus quite harsh and thus disturbing… damn, where is the creamy bokeh of the 70’s lenses gone? I’m missing more and more my old summicron…

  24. Joni Karanka

    I don’t find the image neither touching nor appealing, sorry! The composition is too clean, static, boring and the out of focus areas are too soft, for some specifics. Only thing that I really appreciate is the time of day chosen to shoot this, the light of the sky balances the lamps nicely.

  25. Jim Powers

    I’m tired of fuzzy photos. I know it’s hard to come up with anything different these days to make your work stand out, but it seems like the photo art world is obsessed with it.

    The colors do work well with the CSS theme of the web site, though.

  27. unevolved neanderthal

    Luckily photography is a very broad church.There is ample room for the purist doco’s, the immpressionists, the conceptual modernists, the post winograndian obsessives[ just made that one up :) ]
    and all the other genres and sub-genres that make photography so fascinating. This seems like a picture that has been made to look exactly how it looks by the skill and art of the taker nad that being the case who are any of us to dismiss it? We can subjectively assess it, or objectively try to deconstruct it, but it remains as an image nonetheless. As i said, broad church, and thank god for that.

  29. Jim Powers

    Yep. There is no objective criteria by which to access anything. Our reaction to every image is completely personal. I’m not sure I buy that, though. Photos of cute baby animals make most people smile. There must be something universal in the specific.

  30. bobblack

    Jim: :))

    there are ways, for each of us, to evaluate things (be it a photograph, a political idea, a moral stance, a behavior, a tune, etc) and we evaluate everthing we experience, that’s the mechanism of our sensorial selves and there are indeed ‘universal’ experiences (we are born, we live, we die, we suffer, we experience pleasure, pain, loss gain, etc), but the interesting thing is that the peculiar becomes universal for that reason, we navigate our experiences under the guise that it is personal, and each of us in our personalization does the same damn thing everyone else does, and that is what binds us…the interesting thing, again, as i’ve written before here and elsewhere, is that each of us tends to personalize an image (an experience) and yet most of us seldom try to understand the personal reaction (or the making of something, what another saw in a moment, person, image) of the other. Like grammar: a description of the mechanics of language people tend to use, though we proclaim them as rules, and yet they aren'[t, they’re merely descriptions of tendencies in language that changes and shifts and evolves over time…it’s always a beastly beast, this thing about trying to describe why a photograph (or song or slice of pizza) works…i for one, look at the ‘technique’ the way i respond to grammar: something i respect and acknowledge, but not the arbiter of what draws me to something…re-reading Gogol now: his grammar is fucked, but god damn was he a brilliant writer…it’s like describing a great slice of pizza…is it possible to explain (as i tried to for my wife when we first met) why NY Pizza is sooooo much better than the pizza here in toronto…

    who knows, but you know it when that greasy beast is sliding down the gullet ;))

    cheers
    bob

  34. Herve

    Too far away (in cambodia), can’t read all that was written but caught a few. is it an image? A photograph? Is it meant as any of the above or simply both, expectedly? Maybe that’s where I get stuck before I can really appreciate it as a valid work of personal expression, whatever the means employed: I feel a technique is employed, that of processing DOF thru some software, which in itself is not disqualifying at all. But what is keeping me astray so far, is that it keeps nagging at me to know if that is (the best technique being unseen, or at the very least not thought of beforehand-by the viewer/listener/reader).

    On the other hand, my knowledge of photography, technique wise, is purely based on merely looking at a lot of them. So maybe I am erring in seeing artificial DOF and being stuck at that level of understanding.

  35. Peter Carney

    A really beautiful and challenging image. I, like many others love the variety that David publishes here on Burn and I think this is really where conceptual photography is at the moment. I love the use of such a shallow Dof and it really does make you sit up and take notice of the image. Great tones and the light is stunning.

  36. Jeremy Allen

    Very intriguing image that pulls me in all the way to the back, where I notice the horizon is perfectly aligned above hand rail and below the last light. This must have been a conscious decision. The extremely shallow depth of field adds to the allure. Jeremy

  37. Lassal

    Actually it is not (only) the DoF … otherwise the front of the middle construction would have the same “sharpness” all the way through (= same distance). IMO the image has been “softened” from top (the fuzziest) to down (the sharpest) … Therefore it is hard to grasp making it somehow interesting.

    Good light and color, thoughtfully constructed … I really would love to love this image, but I am missing something. Some disturbance in the perfection. Maybe it is too thoughtfully constructed for me. Sugimoto uses the horizon too to split evenly between sky and ocean. So his images are very formal too. Nonetheless his photographs pull me in right away whereas here the image is keeping me outside. Like looking from the outside to a wonderful catalogue image … Hmmm … I cannot really grasp it. Sorry …

  39. Charles Peterson

    I’m pretty 100% sure this was done with a tilt shift lens and not in post. This pic is not really my cup of tea though I’m glad that DAH is spreading his wings far. It would be a bit of a snooze imo if this forum was just composed entirely of Magnum wannabes (hey, that’s me!).

    This tilt shift thing is quite popular at the moment – we’ve all seen the arial photos that make the urbanscapes look like a miniature model. I’m over it, but this is a pretty subtle use of it. I’m wondering what it would have been like if he had made the horizon sharp and the foreground oof.

    I also have a feeling this photo has a lot more impact very large.

  40. Lassal

    Yeah, could be tilt shift. And you are right, it is quite popular … although decreasing now. Thankfully. Overuse just makes the nicest things get boring.
    Actually I really like the use of it (or whatever Jörg used) here on this image. As you said: subtle.

  42. ben

    ian

    i lived in bournemouth for two years (studied photography there) and you mirrored my thoughts exactly. the last time i wandered past boscombe pier, there were a few empty cans of carling in the bins, but no lapin kulta…

  45. Paul Russell

    Well spotted Ian. This is my “territory” and I didn’t even notice. Although it does look different now they’ve removed the building at the end (and all the dead pigeons).

  50. alun severn

    However the soft focus and shallow DOF has been achieved, I *think* I like it… There’s something counterintuitive about it that holds the attention more than one might initially expect — I think it’s the fact that there is “nothing” in the sharply focused area other than the empty boards and that everything else (the “interest” in the image) is rendered softly… The colours and moood are breathtakingly lovely — gentle and melancholy. Would it hold up to repeated viewings? I’m not sure but will “test” it. Thanks for posting.

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