HO
Toni Hafkensheid

The most fascinating aspect of photography for me is the fact that it so closely resembles reality. In my work I like to explore what constitutes fact and fiction in a photograph by trying to blur the limits between reality and fiction. Although the enclosed photographs represent an actual place, the way I photograph them makes these landscapes look like model train sets.

On a summer trip to British Columbia, Canada a few years ago it struck me, (a city kid from Amsterdam) how bizarre and almost fake the landscape in B.C. looked. It reminded me of the model train set that I used to play with when I was a kid. The train tracks were set in an artificial landscape of fake cotton wool trees, plastic buildings, and cardboard mountains, with little fake men and women walking, shopping, etc. When looking at this landscape at a normal distance, you almost felt like God, high above this artificial world and in total control of it as well. If you looked close enough (eyes about 2 inches above the train tracks) though this world would start to look almost real again.

In this series of photographs I try to play with this illusion of real and fake in the landscape by utilizing a shallow depth of field to make some parts of the image soft and others in focus. The colours in the photographs are tweaked to look like old postcards and recall a certain American dream, an idealized view of an immediate future typical of the 1950’s .

Exhibition date: July 26 – August 25, 2007

gallery   Tammy Salzl   Shannon Collis

Toni Hafkensheid's Website