Photographic Parallels Between Wilderness and Womanhood

There are dark, magical forces at play in Sweden-born, New York-based artist Martina Hoogland Ivanow’s photographic work, swirling through the developing fluid and peeking out in the rosy hues of her atmospheric images. The photographer specialises in blurring the boundaries between the mundane and the utterly abstract, so that her shots of relatively commonplace scenes – a meadow full of flowers, for example, or a group of hikers clambering up a hill – appear to transcend the confines of their actions and inhabit a different galaxy altogether.

This ambiguity is the crux of Hoogland Ivanow’s work – apparently reluctant to make the viewing experience too easy for her audience, she offers two paths – the simple one, and a more complex alternative. The artist releases two exciting new books through independent publisher Livraison Books this month, entitled Satellite and Circular Wait, promising a rich glimpse into her oeuvre.

The second of the two books, spanning her output from 2010-2014, is constructed around this idea of a duality.“Circular Wait proceeds from the longing for the authentic and wild that is fundamental to many subcultures who, to a greater or lesser degree, distance themselves from urban culture,” the publisher explains. “Seeking to live in harmony with nature is often exclusive and only accessible to a select few. Other problematic dimensions include issues of sustainability and gender. The wilderness is not big enough for everyone to live in and warm themselves by an open fire, and, in most cases, a return to a more ‘original’ life involves a return to more rigid gender roles.”

To this end, the book juxtaposes images from eco-villages and stone-age survival schools with different forms of outdoor life and encounters with nature. The aesthetic of the images, too, seems to straddle the organic and the fantastical – muted colour palettes awash with greens and murky browns are placed side by side with fluorescent brights, to create an oddly harmonious collision of ideas, while oceans appear streaked with pink and purple as though a tanker full of coloured inks had leaked mid-voyage. A mystical and earthy sojourn from everyday life. 

Martina Hoogland Ivanow's Satellite and Circular Wait are out now, published by Livraison.