VICTORIA SIEMER 

Victoria Siemer is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She makes abstract, contemporary photographs, predominately featuring landscapes, that have a soft, almost ethereal mood to them. I am interested in her Geometric Reflections series, in which she blends geometric shapes into natural landscapes to produce upside-down, backwards, and fragmented reflections. Unlike Martin Parr’s manual film work, Siemer's photography exists very much in the digital realm. She uses Photoshop to rotate and convert her landscapes into these surreal, geometric creations, using basic shapes to repeat elements of the image.

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Siemer’s intention with the work is to convey the feeling that no matter how much we as humans try to manipulate our environment, we really have very little control over nature and the world around us. The blocky, geometric shapes reflect the neat precise architecture of humans and I like the way these contrast to the wild, ephemeral landscapes she photographs.

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In Peach Mountains (right) Siemer has photographed a misty, soft view of the mountains around her home state. She’s then used Adobe Photoshop to flip the image of the mountains upside down, creating a reflection. This reflection has then been cropped into a unnaturally perfect semi-circle, giving it the quality of human interference in the landscape that Siemer is trying to achieve. This out-of-place-ness draws the eye is drawn to the out of place ‘reflection’ that has been centralised in the image to make it the focal point.

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I like the clean geometric shapes and her use of soft, pastel colours or gray moody tones that have been chosen to create a dreamy, ethereal feeling. This gentle desaturation is a direct contrast to Parr’s bright, saturated colours and Siemer’s atmospheric scenes, filled with overcast skies and monotone colour palettes, make the viewer feel drawn into the sense of place, a little lost in the soft natural-ness of it.

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Peach Mountains fills the frame with the mountains taking up the whole of the bottom third of the canvas, and the semi circle balanced above it with an equal amount of negative space around it in the top two thirds. The photograph is balanced centrally, in the middle third of the photo’s composition and the semi circle creates a frame in which the landscape is repeated. Siemer has used natural lighting, with a soft, dreamy kind of filter over it to soften the harsh black and white tones that would be present in the mountains. The mountains bring texture to the bottom third of the image and the repetition of them creates a sort of simple pattern.  The formal element of shape is vital to Siemer’s work and the mountains create a line across the bottom third that leads the eye along it.  The camera was focused on the mountains, with the sky behind them out of focus, softened by the shallow depth of field meaning Siemer used a wide aperture of around F.4 to take the photograph. A fast shutter speed was used to keep everything crisp and in focus with no motion blurr. ​

She captures the essence of the landscape

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Considering Siemer’s other works, I like the focal point of the tiny bird in Mountain Bird  (pictured below) and how the viewer's attention is drawn to it because it's the only element of the image that has not been mirrored. 

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In my work, I would like to take photos of British and abroad landscapes and then use Adobe Photoshop to create Siemer style geometric reflections and colours, with the intention of creating dissonance in the image, perhaps between my photographs of different locations.