Between Waves | Tandem | Films

Between immersion and contemplation, the photographer's eye quietly scrutinizes nature.

About

Synopsis

Between immersion and contemplation, the photographer's eye quietly scrutinizes nature.Neil Lang serenely captures simple things, which he describes as fabulous, to better convey his emotions and his sense of harmony.

The artist

Neil Lang was born in New York in 1967.
Photographer, he lives and works in Paris. He is represented by Galerie Odile Ouizeman, Paris.

Technical data

Director	Liam O'Prey
Editor	Camille Guyot
Music composer	Guillaume Metier
Duration	06:13

Chronicle

"It is a different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye; so different that in place of a space consciously woven together by a man on the spot there enters a space held together unconsciously.”
Walter Benjamin

American photographer and video artist Neil Lang turns his recording equipment into sensors for capturing micro-phenomena, imperceptible to the naked eye. As he does so, his favourite subject, nature, ceases to be an object in front of him, a landscape laid out for the eye. It becomes an environment in which he can immerse himself, capturing its movements, its rustles, its energies. This focus on the infinitesimal made possible by the telephoto lens, combined with the cancellation of distance, brings him closer to the sensation of infinity and of being part of nature, among other living creatures.

The horizon where sky and earth meet, the mountain peaks that touch the clouds, the living mystery of the night, the shimmering surface of the sea and the changing tides provide the material for visual and sound recordings, made on long walks as part of a meditative experience where the markers of time and space become blurred.

Liam O'Prey brings us up against Neil Lang's artistic universe, suggesting the search for an immersive vision that reduces, even cancels, the distance between subject and object. To transmit a sensory experience gained through contact with nature is to take a different path from that of its objective representation. It is towards this sensation of nature internalised by the artist – into the layers of an art created around the unexpected, as revealed by the magic of precision optics – that the director leads us.

Marguerite Pilven

A graduate in philosophy and art history, Marguerite Pilven is an art critic and curator and a member of the AICA. Since 2015, she has broadened her scope to include writing outreach and communication documents for various institutions (accompanying notes for works of art, exhibition booklets, texts presenting artistic projects, books on art and publications of multiple...) As a press manager, she writes and creates information materials for the visual arts, which she distributes to journalists and art professionals (critics, curators, influencers, etc.).