all photos this page Bart van Damme
In the Maasvlakte series, one catches more than a whiff of van Damme’s influences from the New Topographics movement and more immediately the work of Andreas Gursky and Edward Burtynsky. His approach he explains, ‘is more documentary than artistic’ though one may argue that point in viewing the results; the magnetism of the Maasvlakte images is undeniable. Van Damme is self-effacing about the source of any artistry, much like John Clare when he claimed of his pastoral poetry, ‘I found the poems in the field and only wrote them down’, Bart van Damme sees his work as collecting the artistry inherent in the area. ‘Maasvlakte has opened up new creative possibilities to see and document the landscape […] to me it is an artistic landscape that seems to transcend its mere function.’ He concludes, ‘I try not to be biased in my work.’ This is where he distinguishes himself from his influences. For Gursky and Burtynsky, the power of their work lies in the sublime tension between the visual beauty and the moral consequences of our cultural desires. Within Gursky’s photographs there is a weighted sense of alienation in junk culture size and multiplicity, and Burtynsky’s images seem to contain large scale versions of the original environmentalist symbols of the pipe spewing sludge and the oil-covered bird.
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