Dreamscapes

French artist Michel Rajkovic is a perfectionist when it comes to researching and selecting locations for his emotionally charged landscape photographs.

In 2008 this dedication was rewarded with a first prize at the Prix de la Photographie Paris. Without fail he finds situations that visually describe those magical moments of sunrise and sunset. And he is capable of bolstering the character of dreamlike sequences by using prolonged exposures to smooth out water surfaces, sedate and elongate cloud formations, and accentuate the horizon line.

He guides our gaze gently, for example to a dock floating on a lake in which its stakes have long since sunk. Rajkovic composes highly charged landscapes in his black-and-white photography, some of which celebrate magical moments of appearance and disappearance with soft wisps of fog. The historic lake bridge and the strangely constructed iron pavilion seem to float strangely above the water’s surface: its legs are no longer anchored in the water but in billowy cotton.

The interplay of sky and water, landscape and horizon is characterized by the smooth chronologic and visual transitions. Rajkovic has honed the photographic phenomenon of holding everything in suspense. His photographs forego dramatic cloud formations and spectacular panoramas but celebrate instead slightly distended situations that make time for introspection. In the wonderful shades of gray hidden in coastal landscapes and in rocky bluffs shrouded in the morning fog the photographer discovers a harmonious peacefulness and a restrained way of handling time and space. Our gaze may drift deep into the distance, and time in Rajkovic’s dreamscapes seems to go by ever so slowly, as though we were present at an everlasting wonder of nature.

Christina Wendenburg