text & photographs by Sander Meisner
edited by Victor Anton
I have been photographing a series of images based around the idea of the “abstract city” or the “abstract landscape”. The images are basically made with geometrical compositions in the back of my mind, and with the intention of completely taking the subject matter out of context. The images are printed and sold exclusively by the Eurart project, a company that organises exhibitions troughout Europe and prints and sells limited edition work of different artists. The goal of this company is to make art affordable for people that cannot afford to buy pieces in gallery’s for gallery prices. So the editions of the prints are higher than my normal work, the sizes much smaller and the prices much lower.
I like to photograph the sleeping infrastructure of the urban environment, shooting in the middle of the night I often going out at ten or eleven, photographing until sunrise. I photograph when everybody is asleep, and sometimes it’s so quiet it is as if the city itself is asleep.
I tend to go to the outer regions of a city, to the more industrial and commercial areas to shoot. These areas are similar in any city. That’s part of the reason why they interest me so much, everybody recognises them for what they are, yet nobody likes them.
By night, people often feel a lot of places become quiet sinister, but if you look deeper, the night creates a lot of beauty in places that aren’t considered beautiful. The colors, shadows and transformation of texture and geometric appearance of a lot of places at night can dramatically increase their beauty. People fear the dark, but when photographed with long shutter speeds the dark turns out to be both very colorful and pretty.
Sander Meisner is a self-taught photographer (Amsterdam, 1979) living and working in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
He is represented by Brandt gallery in Amsterdam (www.galeriebrandt.com).
