PHOTOGRAPHY

THE GENIUS OF RENATE ALLER

THE WORLD OF HUMANS AND NATURE IN THE CAMERA OF RENATE ALLER

By Maximillien de Lafayette, Syndicated Columnist.

 

Photo: A composition-etude by Renate Aller.

RENATE ALLER, an innovative installations and  photography artist was born in Germany. She worked with an astonishing variety of medium, ranging from ceramics and woodcarving  to photography, installations and museum presentations. Currently, she lives and works in New York City. But, her busy schedule and international exhibitions keep her floating around the globe. Few artists in America captured the nature, its clouds, horizons, seascapes and skies serenity and divine beauty like Renate Aller. A superb artist who blends the traditional with the avant garde. Academically trained, Renate freed herself from stagnant traditional artistic dogma to explore the parallel world of the camera. A world, where only the gifted visionary can detect, discover and measure the beauty, quietness, transparency  and drama of "things" and "entities" we sense from within. Even though, all of us see and admire the beauty and infinity of the skies, the seas and the horizon, rarely, we sense what make them escape our visions and retain our existence. There is a drama in the universe that only photographers can capture and illustrate. A poesy in motion which orchestrates the rhythm of our lives, and it vibrates in their camera. Only, the gifted artist like Renate Alle, Marbara Singer and  Max Waldman frame, freeze and  flirt with  the reality of what we see. It is easy to shoot pictures and play with the camera. It is difficult to invite nature to enter the camera and feel at home. And once, nature is there...in this small mechanical box, the photographer begins to listen...and Oh Lord! what nature in that small box can, could and would tell the photographers, and how much  secrets mother nature  would reveal...

 

Photo: The Living Theatre. An Improvisation based on "Paradise Now”.  Photographs by Max Waldman, 1969.
 

Renate Aller's camera is that small box, but it  is also,  an immense universe of what we love, cherish and disregard. She flirts with nature. Yet, she challenged it quite often and dared to enslave its tragedies. She did it when she shot the 9/11 tragedy. She did it when she revolutionized the concept of installations photography. There are two other American master-photographers who walk side by side with Renate Aller and converse so honestly and eloquently with nature, humans and the infinite world which separates and unites them: Max Waldman and  Barbara Singer. Three of them, Aller, Singer and Waldman succeeded in flying high, far and so high in the firmament of thoughts, feelings and visions...and touched the face of God... and came back to tell their story.  A camera-story which  contains all the things we encounter in our daily life. Beginning with simple photos of ordinary people, passing by sites we see only see  in books and ending with bursting skies, frightening horizons in their beauty...and yet, we escape the moment, the very moment we need to realize the majesty of nature and eloquent silence of banal "things" which constitute and animate our daily life, like a chair, a desk, a fixture, a pier's rope, a pair of high heels, lights and shadows entering and leaving abandoned buildings and lonely streets. Aller, Waldman and Singer got hold of these moments, intense and serene moments...and metamorphosed them into pictures and installations in motion.

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