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.
Renate
Aller
made her mark on world photography. She did it with tragic simplicity and
eloquent silence in motion, lights, shadows and the multi-juxtaposed
dimensions of her camera, capturing the moment when the clouds and
seascapes unite with the divine and the unreachable...She is a New Yorker
who's camera witnessed the 9/11 tragedy, the glamour of women's motionless
sensuality and the drama that ties humans with a bursting and screaming
nature. She photographs femme fatales, elegant women, the clouds,
inexistent people who make you think, and the infinity of nothingness. You
see it in her shots of angry and nostalgic skies, horizons, clouds,
seascapes and ultra modern installations.
