PHOTO:Stratographs by Simon Norfolk

 The new exhibition of Simon Norfolk (born in Lagos, Nigeria, 1963), entitled Statographs consists of two series of photographs that document the impress of days, months, and years on the surface of the planet. The cyclical nature of Norfolk’s images conveys a sense of perseverance and strength, both human and natural. Snow falls and melts, the leaves wither and return, the land is plowed, planted, and harvested.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Benrubi Gallery Archive

“The main creation of Afghan culture is the landscape itself”, the artist has said, “but one has to stop, sit quietly and take time, to see it at work”. In October 2014, Simon Norfolk traveled to Kenya to record the dramatic decline of the Lewis Glacier, which has been receding for the past eighty years. Using old maps and modern GPS surveys, Norfolk charted the glacier’s previous boundaries, then set his camera for hour-long exposures and walked the former outline while carrying a petroleum torch. The resulting images enclose the diminished glacier in a fiery border, as if Norfolk is inscribing the epitaph of the glacier on the earth itself. Fire is juxtaposed against ice, yet the dominant images are of earth and air, which are all that will remain after “the poor, doomed glacier” has completely melted. The sense of loss in the Kenya images is balanced by the curious, even hopeful serenity of Norfolk’s photographs of the war-ravaged Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan, once famous for its 170-foot-tall Buddhas, now infamous for their destruction at the hands of the Taliban in 2001. Norfolk photographed more than a dozen locations in the valley on a seasonal basis. A small village stands on the plain before a cliff wall dotted by hundreds of cave mouths, as well as the alcoves that once held the statues of the 1400-year-old Buddhas. The niches are empty now, but so too are the windows of many of the buildings in the village, bare in one photograph, covered by tarp in the next, then bare again-practical responses to the daily realities of life that humanize a loss so monumental that it can easily become abstract.

Info: Benrubi Gallery, 521 West 26th Street, New York, Duration: 5/2-21/3/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, http://benrubigallery.com/home