Florian Maier-Aichen: Rejecting Tradition
Florian Maier-Aichen talks about rejecting the dogmatic approach and lighting sensibility of the Dusseldorf School of photography, traveling to Los Angeles to make a fresh start.
Credits
Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Robert Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Joaquin Perez, Mark Sutton & Jake Yuzna.
-
Alternately romantic, cerebral, and unearthly, Florian Maier-Aichen’s digitally altered photographs are closer to the realm of drawing and fiction than documentation. He embraces difficult techniques, chooses equipment that produces accidents such as light leaks and double exposures, and uses computer enhancements to introduce imperfections and illogical elements into images that paradoxically “feel” visually right, though they are factually wrong. Often employing an elevated viewpoint (the objective but haunting “God’s-eye view” of aerial photography and satellite imaging), Maier-Aichen creates idealized, painterly landscapes that function like old postcards.
Florian Maier-Aichen
“When you think about America, you eventually think of its huge, vast, landscape.”
Florian Maier-Aichen
Built-In Mistakes
In this interview from 2008, conducted at the artist’s Los Angeles studio, Florian Maier-Aichen discusses his beginnings as an artist, the evolution of his hybrid practice, and his respect for nineteenth-century landscape photographers.
