Lukas Felzmann

Waters In Between

An Archive of a Marsh with Marginalia by Angelus Silesius and John Berger

The photographer Lukas Felzmann was fascinated by the very thing that some driving past would find boring, flat, and disconsolate: the vast Sacramento Valley, located just a hundred miles from San Francisco. Felzmann discovers with his camera the hidden charms of that seeming nonplace. For him, exploring a place means both walking around and lingering quietly, until the valley opens up like a book, with stories that cry out to be read and discovered. With his camera he traces how time, determined here by the growth of the plants, slows on the plane, and how the horizontality of the surface becomes a reassuring balance to the hectic city of millions nearby. The photographs show the diversity of the plane: the original landscape in its natural state, the large swaths put to agricultural use, the modern provincial towns, and the transitional areas in between. Photographs of water in all its facets run through the book, just as water runs through and forms a valley.

The photographer Lukas Felzmann was fascinated by the very thing that some driving past would find boring, flat, and disconsolate: the vast Sacramento Valley, located just a hundred miles from San Francisco. Felzmann discovers with his camera the hidden charms of that seeming nonplace. For him, exploring a place means both walking around and lingering quietly, until the valley opens up like a book, with stories that cry out to be read and discovered. With his camera he traces how time, determined here by the growth of the plants, slows on the plane, and how the horizontality of the surface becomes a reassuring balance to the hectic city of millions nearby. The photographs show the diversity of the plane: the original landscape in its natural state, the large swaths put to agricultural use, the modern provincial towns, and the transitional areas in between. Photographs of water in all its facets run through the book, just as water runs through and forms a valley.

Winner of the International photobook Award Kassel 2009

Author(s): Lukas Felzmann

With photographs by Lukas Felzmann

19 x 27 cm, 7 ½ x 10 ¾ in

320 pages, 161 illustrations

hardback

2009, 978-3-03778-138-8, English
CHF 55.00

Lukas Felzmann

Lukas Felzmann is an artist working with photography, installations and books. Born in 1959 in Zurich, he grew up in Switzerland, and has been living and working in San Francisco since 1981 where he tought photography at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University for two decades. He is an affiliated scholar at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford University. His work has been shown in exhibitions in Europe, Egypt, Columbia, China and the United States. He has been awarded several grants from the Swiss government, two from the American National Endowments for the Arts, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography in 2018.