Darren Almond ; full moon

In Fullmoon, the conceptual meets the poetic: British artist Darren Almond catches natural archetypes and silent landscapes in night photographs made under a full moon, with the shutter kept open for over a quarter of an hour. The long exposure time illuminates the landscape almost like daybreak, but the atmosphere is different: a mild glow emanates even from the shadows, star-lines cross the sky, and water blankets the earth like a misty froth. The enhanced moonlight infuses the pictures with a haunted quality, casting the landscapes in an unease, in a sense of the sublime and in a contemplation of time, both in our natural surroundings and in the photographic art. This book collects roughly 250 images which Almond captured following the full moon around the globe. Natural monuments like Yosemite National Park and the German Isle of Rügen draw links to Romantic paintings by Albert Bierstadt and Caspar David Friedrich, respectively, and the whole series circles around the possibility of Romantic themes today: majestic American mountains, austere Arctic ice fields, picturesque rocks by the seashore in Japan, and, most intimately viewed, the nature of Britain, whose painterly subjects are closest to home. This book covers all parts of the series from the turn of the century up until today, with an introduction by Sheena Wagstaff, head of the Modern and Contemporary Art Department of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.