INK Focus - Constructed Landscapes: Addendum by Dafna Talmor

The ‘Constructed Landscapes’ series has evolved into a number of books; a medium with its own narrative. How did you approach sequencing, materiality, process and design to translate your landscapes into a tactile object?

I had been developing the project for about ten years before it felt right to think about it in book form. The initial step that preceded the collaboration with Fw:Books on the 2020 monograph, was to produce a book dummy in 2018 designed by Loose Joints. We had collaborated on a text-based limited-edition booklet in 2017, to coincide with my first solo show in the UK. It was great to work with them again to consolidate material from the first two volumes of the series.

The transition into book form enabled me to incorporate elements that were intrinsic to the project yet had never been shown publicly; process material that includes logs of the contact sheet images – the only document that is left of the original images before the negatives are reconfigured - my darkroom tests with technical notations, alongside the main plates of the two volumes that made up the series up until that point. The dummy was subsequently shortlisted in several open calls which gave me the confidence to start thinking about publishers.

Bookmaking has always been a collaborative process in my experience. That kind of translation and shift in context is very particular. As you point out, the sequencing, materiality, and editing is key - I didn’t feel I had the skills, or the desire, to make a book independently. I really enjoy working with other people and bookmaking is a fun problem-solving exercise that activates the work very differently to the context of an exhibition space.

A book, typically, can provide a much more intimate encounter, a space for people to re-visit the work in a way that a finite exhibition doesn’t. With bookmaking, text, I find, can play an integral role, not only in contextualising the work but in creating breaks and invoking rhythm. The monograph includes four commissioned texts in different forms. Two essays, a poem and an interview – all of which had very different functions. The book was divided into two sections: the main plates and the index, which contained the process material alongside other elements of the process. The book also included a reproduction of the cutting board I’ve been using since the project started and the handmade negatives - both of which allude to the process in a different way to the core content. As well as using two different paper stocks to differentiate between the sections, these decisions were made collaboratively with Hans Gremmen, the designer and co-founder of Fw:Books.

In Constructed Landscapes: Addendum, the material that INK generously retouched for the upcoming publication, stemmed directly from the 2020 monograph. That monograph served as a catalyst to produce new work. The new book relies on the repurposing and reimagining of redundant source material, an extension of a process integral to my practice. In this work, through multiple transitions and reproductions, colour photograms render the original source material and its connotations invisible, while retaining its indexical trace. 

By oscillating between negatives and positives the work seeks to playfully blur the often-rigid boundaries and reductive relationship imposed on traditional photographic practices. Through this process, a cycle of mechanical reproduction is instigated, eventually coming full circle. In this case, it was obvious from the beginning that the material would loop back into book form.

The title ‘Constructed Landscapes’ suggests a tension between manipulation and authenticity. How do you balance the photographic document with abstraction or intervention & what does this interplay reveal about our relationship to place and memory?

The photographic document as both a starting point and counterpoint to the abstracted landscapes that are produced by reconfiguring negatives, is integral in its reference to the constructed nature of photographic images. All photographic images, since photography’s inception, involve manipulation in one way or another – in some cases the manipulation is just more extreme or obvious.

I’ve always been interested in the inherent contradictions that seem to be particularly characteristic of the photographic medium. For example, the photograph with its indexical trace in relation to the act of photographing and constructing an image, and in the case of Constructed Landscapes, the paradoxical relationship the work holds in terms of notions of place.

The codes that make up the titles also play a role in terms of these types of contradictions. From Volume II onwards, comprising abbreviations of the locations, relating to the original year the material was photographed and the number of negatives that were used to construct an image, there is an abstraction in the coded titles which mirror what the images allude to. They provide an identifier that has a semblance of neutrality although classification systems are constructs too. I hope that pendulum is what evokes the tension you mention, a kind of destabilising factor that raises questions & enables the viewer to consider their own role in the construction of meaning, landscape and relationship to notions of place and memory.

Many of your landscapes feel simultaneously familiar and alien, evoking a sense of displacement. Are you intentionally engaging with themes of migration, environmental transformation, or the erasure of place—and if so, how do these ideas resonate with your own cross-cultural experiences or broader sociopolitical contexts?

Similarly to what I refer to in the previous question, I am more interested in the work being suggestive rather than literal. There are a myriad of ways to contextualise the work, and I am interested in what people bring to it as much as what the original intentions may have been. For me, the drive to make work (generally) is that it is a form of conversation – the conversation starts with oneself, extends to others and is in dialogue with external references, such as the ones mentioned in the introduction.

Work is not produced in a vacuum and is activated once it is encountered by people and across different contexts. There are autobiographical elements when thinking around representations of landscape which informed the work to begin with. Yet those are merely starting points that provide the impetus to produce work. Once the work starts to evolve so many other things come to the surface, especially as the work is so process-driven. I don’t want to stifle those references or associations by being too prescriptive.

Your work involves cutting, splicing, and collaging film negatives to create hybrid landscapes. Do the physical limitations of working with analog materials influence the theme of “constructed” spaces?

Limitations, more broadly, play an integral role in my practice, whether it’s thinking through limitations of photography itself, analogue processes, or limitations in the form of “rules” I set myself as parameters. The early work of Constructed Landscapes (Vol. I) involved combining two negatives from different locations & only cutting out one element from one negative to create a hybrid space.

From the project’s inception, I decided I didn’t want the cuts or interventions, that are central to the process, to be arbitrary. I therefore set myself the rule of cutting out anything that was very obviously human-made – roads, bridges, buildings, lampposts – anything that interrupted the so-called ‘purity’ of the landscape. It was a way to point to the slippery nature of what is deemed as natural & was paradoxical as the voids – a result of the incision & the difference in exposure – created a new human-made interruption. (A manual intervention that served as a contrast to the mechanical aspects of photography).

So much of what we perceive as natural is actually fabricated, altered or shaped by humans. That preoccupation has remained consistent throughout the work, although the mechanisms or processes continue to shift from one volume to another.

For example, in the current (third) volume, the work has shifted in its process quite substantially. Hand-built “master” negatives are now constructed from fragments of up to 29 different source negatives, leading to multiple outcomes. Each image made of collaged negatives expands over time as a set of unique preparatory studies. Doubling as test prints that enable me to see how each image evolves, the studies reveal their edges & the obsessive numbering logged by hand which correlates to the source negatives used in the construction of each image. Once I’m happy with the composition, the final study becomes the “master” print. Reasserting the multifarious personalities inherent to photography, it is consequently printed & framed as a cropped large-scale iteration or re-fragmented into multi-paneled editions.

The physical process of cutting and collaging film introduces unpredictability. Have there been instances where “mistakes” or unintended outcomes during construction led to a breakthrough in the work?

Absolutely. The notion of unpredictability is essential to the process & so-called mistakes or imperfections are embraced as an intrinsic part of the work. For example, an integral part of the process that started out for practical reasons – outlining the cuts with a permanent marker to guide my scalpel – leaves a residue or trace that manifests as coloured marks. These become embedded within the image and form part of the visual language that is a specific result of the optics and hardware of the darkroom.

However, this is balanced with a great deal of control or consideration. I tend to use the traditional notion of the “decisive moment” as an example and how in the case of Constructed Landscapes, rather than having one decisive moment when taking the original picture, there are a series of decisive moments that unfold in the process of re-constructing and re-purposing the source material in the darkroom.

The series repurposes photographs taken over years, even decades. How does revisiting & recontextualising your own archival images shape your understanding of time, geography, or personal history?

Revisiting and recontextualising my archive were the only ways to inject any purpose and broader meaning to the material that instigated Constructed Landscapes over ten years ago.

It was a way to turn frustration or failure into something productive and positive. The project stemmed from years of accumulating negatives that sat in boxes devoid of any meaning beyond a personal and compulsive need to photograph places I passed through. I felt quite overwhelmed (and still do) when taking photographs of landscapes – the lack of obvious limitations and the vastness that is encountered.

That sublime moment that is spoken of so often when encountering a landscape is something I really struggle to convey through a singular image. Combining multiple views and fragmenting a landscape within one photographic frame enables me to conflate time, memory and associations. To me, this plurality is a “truer” representation of the experience of a landscape.

While the work draws from your personal archive, the landscapes feel universally evocative. How do you navigate the line between intimate memory and creating imagery that invites collective interpretation?

I have always been interested in that precarious balance. How does one take something that is so personal, loaded with very particular connotations and transform it into something of greater universality? I don’t believe absolute universality exists – however the work is driven by a utopian aspiration to strip places of their specificity to leave enough space for other people to project their own experiences or ideas.

To have enough that is relatable and can anchor the viewer without limiting or constricting their experience. There is something particularly challenging about doing so when it comes to images of landscapes that come loaded with so much baggage in terms of history and geopolitics.

It would be naïve of me to think it is possible to neutralise these spaces altogether so it is this contradiction that the work grapples with constantly. There is a push and pull that gets played out through the work. I hope it perpetuates an active way of looking and thinking about the complexity & mediation of photographic images.

Your upcoming show at the Sid Motion Gallery invites physical engagement with the work. How are you considering the gallery’s architecture or atmosphere in curating the exhibition? Will the installation challenge or expand how viewers perceive the “constructed” nature of the landscapes?

The work in the show was made in direct response to notions of architecture, whether that is the architecture of images, metaphorically, or the architecture of physical spaces that have literally shaped and formed the work.

The majority of the work in the solo show stems from a private commission and mirrors proportions from windows of the domestic space I stayed in. The work that was produced was mediated and informed by external factors – the landscape, the house I stayed in throughout the commission, the darkroom I produced my work in and the gallery the work is shown in, each played their role.  Architectural and mathematical details generally rendered inconsequential, became integral to the way the work was produced. These relational decisions were extended further throughout the exhibition, bridging time and space both within and beyond the frame.

One set of framed work informed the dimensions of the next in a chain of interconnectedness and internalised systems of logic. Extending the dialogue with architecture, the exhibition includes a multi-panelled site-specific photographic sculpture made in reference to the window panes of the main gallery space. In this case, proportions are relative to the dimensions of the 5x4 enlarger I use in my London darkroom. Rotations, repetition and shifts in scale invoke a rhythm, inviting viewers to move in, out and around the work.

If these landscapes could exist in a tangible, three-dimensional form—as an architectural space or an immersive environment—how might they challenge or redefine human interaction with place? Would you want viewers to “inhabit” these constructed worlds physically, or does their power lie in remaining elusive, tethered to the realm of the imagined?

As mentioned, the show includes a second sculptural iteration of the work. The first iteration was produced in 2021 in response to a commission for Unseen Unbound. In both cases, despite being three dimensional, the work - very consciously - reasserts the flatness of photographic surfaces, a conceptual reminder of the mediation of the experience of a landscape through particular Western pictorial and perspectival conventions. These are cultural constructs that encourage a particular way of seeing that I think can often be taken for granted.

The new work is made of multiple panels – mounted & framed C-type handprints - that have been produced from one source negative and subsequently fragmented and re-assembled. The piece functions as an invitation to walk around the work and encourage physical encounters with the work, which is different to encountering framed work on the wall. The aim is that the two modes are complementary in terms of reasserting the fragmentation and plurality of viewpoints that the work seeks to convey.

Just as the context of a book presents an opportunity to engage with material in a particular way, I really enjoy the problem-solving that producing work in an exhibition context entail. I hope that whatever form the work takes - how it occupies and activates space - that it continues to remain elusive and tethered to the realm of the imaginary, albeit one that is rooted in reality: contradictory, hybrid and paradoxical.