I am drawn to the colours and tones within the landscapes in Ellen Kooi’s work. Her large scale, panoramic shots are a dramatic and effective way for producing impact with a landscape photograph. I am interested to experiment with large scale images.
Dutch photographer Ellen Kooi, 1962, works and lives in The Netherlands. She makes large-scale photographs. They are stories created on camera that seek the border between reality and fantasy. The landscapes and the subjects, often young girls or boys, fit together perfectly and create a dramatic and poetic scene. Ellen has been in numerous exhibitions worldwide and her work can be found in various private and public collections. The following images come from her portfolio.
http://500photographers.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/photographer-197-ellen-kooi.html
Born 1962, Leeuwarden, The Netherlands
Dutch photographer Ellen Kooi received her art education at the Art Academy ABK Minerva in Groningen, Netherlands and completed her post graduate studies in Art at the Rijksacademy in Amsterdam. Shot at a wide angle, landscape orientation, the beguiling color and natural scenery of her images contradict the intense orchestration of her compositions. Hours of labored control over lighting and arrangement of her subjects are part of each photograph. Every image appears to have been shot in the middle of a dark fairytale set in the hinterlands of Holland. Uncanny disquiet weaves a characteristic thread through the narrative non-linear style of her larger body of work.
http://cclarkgallery.com/artists/bios/ellen-kooi
The large-scale panoramic photographs by Ellen Kooi challenge us to view the world as a dramatic narrative. She wants us to seek the border between fantasy and reality. At first glance, the people that inhabit these panoramas of (mostly Dutch) landscapes seem to be at the mercy of their surroundings. But if we look at these pictures more carefully we see a more complex relationship, as the landscape almost responses to its inhabitants. The displays of nature we see are a symbolic reflection of the inner turmoils, or indeed of the happiness of these people. In a way comparable tot nineteenth century psychological portraits, kooi tries to tell us about myths, chance encounters and our relationship with the outside world. But keeping this in mind, her works are as much concerned with the landscape as they are with the person. By forming close connections between themes set in our visual memory of history but never choosing a main focus, Kooi’s works are suspensefull and hard to identify.
Using her experience in photographing both theatre and dance, Kooi creates scenes that feel familiar but look magical. Her refined techniques allow her to photograph landscapes in a way that we fail too see them. While some seem to focus on the fairytale qualities of her work, there also is a grimmer side to them. Children who at first seem to be frolicking may actually be running away scared or even petrified. A gorgeous woman doesn’t gaze at the beautiful landscape, she sees the oncoming industry behind it. Like the solitary figures in the works of Caspar David Friedrich, the inhabitants of the world of Ellen Kooi are always both in awe and in distress. The contrast between a personal world of fantasy and surrounding elements that are both real and symbolic form the richness of Koois work.
http://www.torchgallery.com/ellen-kooi.html
Ellen Kooi takes staged photographs. From 1981 until 1986 she attended the Minerva Academy in Groningen. In the period after the academy, she is mainly occupied with ad hoc projects and theatre photography.
These series show clearly that in the city-landscapes by Kooi the central idea always evolves around people. People in motion, their outline, their body language, and their relation to their environment: all these elements make up the theme throughout her work.
The work of photographer Jeff Wall is a source of inspiration to her, but also that of choreographers the likes of Bausch or De Keersemaker.
Even more inverted is the move from the every day to the extraordinary, to strange and wringing in the most recent work by Ellen Kooi.
Her photographs grow more severe as time goes by, and therefore all the more concentrated.
sophie elliston - visual arts 