Product Details
Hardcover
96 pages
Aperture
Published 1997
Review
"Opening this book, I seemed to step through the door of a spacecraft onto the surface of a distant, ruined planet. Its landscape was haunted with the bizarre forms and inexplicable structures of an alien civilization-their meanings lost, their uses inscrutable.
Page after page I discovered puzzling and unaccountable vistas that should have felt familiar but didn't. Whether Jan Staller's camera has transformed these landscapes or transformed the viewer I'm not certain. But I do know that he gives us a chance to travel to the outskirts of our own world...as aliens." --Terry Gilliam, Filmmaker
"Bold and mysterious, [Staller's photographs] capture silent, poetic landscapes." --The New York Times
Book Description
On Planet Earth: Travels in an Unfamiliar Land collects Jan Staller's strangely seductive photographs from locations across the United States and around the world.-from abandoned factories to military test sites, from high-tech water-purification plants to heavy machinery that looks like it fell from outer space. Staller's square-format and panoramic photographs reveal bizarre and forgotten constructions of industrial society, set against a symphony of color and light.
A sense of mystery pervades Staller's images: ordinary building devices and machine parts take on the aura of Surrealist sculptures, while common construction sites echo the sacred grounds of ancient civilizations. Using long exposures and a combination of light sources-often photographing at dawn or dusk-Staller produces photographs that are breathtakingly rich in color and intensity.
Complementing the images in On Planet Earth is a narrative by Luc Sante, who shares Staller's fascination with urban and industrial wastelands, the history they contain, and the mysteries they conceal. Together, Staller's photographs and Sante's text offer a stimulating, Technicolor tour of the unknown at the edge of the contemporary landscape. |
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