Untitled 1980

This silver gelatin print shows a cluster of simple dwellings on a floating island, captured by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. I wonder about Ursula standing there, composing the shot. Squinting, adjusting her lens, thinking about light and shadow. Photography is like painting with light, right? She’s framing a world within a world, these little structures perched on the water. The quiet, almost ghostly tones create such stillness, an ethereal quality. It’s a little sad, lonely even. This scene is so minimal: the simple forms of the houses, the flat plane of the water, and the wide open sky, it’s so poetic. Schulz-Dornburg has a way of finding these forgotten or overlooked places and revealing their strange beauty. It reminds me of other photographers who seek out similar liminal spaces, like Robert Adams or Lewis Baltz, quiet observers of the human-altered landscape. It’s like they’re all in conversation, these artists.