Reading the Landscape
Olaf Otto Becker
Artist Statement
My pictures are an attempt to report on what I've seen with my own eyes and what has, deeply moved me. For many years I've been visiting places where human beings have encountered pristine nature, either directly or indirectly, and I've watched as these places have shrunk at an alarming rate.
The power of our economic system has now become so extensive and so complexly amorphous that it is very difficult to grasp. Corporations tend to react to legislation and other attempts to control their actions simply by strategically shifting their position. There is now good reason to believe that this planet is being changed ever more quickly and uncontrollably by human overpopulation, high material expectations and general opportunism.
Humans destroy primary forests, which have been growing for millions of years, within decades. At the same time, humans create a version of nature according to their own imaginations in the megacities of the world, turning nature into a product.
"Reading the Landscape" shows three states of nature in the primary forests of Indonesia and Malaysia: intact nature, ravaged nature, and artificial nature. Altogether, the project documents a fatal ecological and economic process that has progressed beyond the point of reversibility.'
(Olaf Otto Becker)
Biography
Olaf Otto Becker was born in 1959 in Germany and studied communciation design and philosophy during the 90s. He combines his personal and artistic approach with documentary intention and socio-cultural questions. His images act as poetic images and documentation of processes in the world of today.