© Olivo Barbieri

© Olivo Barbieri / Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC

 

Despite the fact that water has never, yet, been a primary cause of violent conflict, a recent OECD briefing warned that “water-related tensions” threatened to emerge at local, national, international and even global levels. It is timely, then, that Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri’s latest work The Waterfall Project is motivated in part by recognition of the cultural and political importance of water in the 21st century: “I wanted to look at the natural environment and, before even oil, the most important liquid in the world is water.”

“But it is very difficult to see water because when you look at a river or at the sea – you see something flat. The only way to see or visualise water is to take a picture of a waterfall – so I started The Waterfall Project.”

“The places where I took the pictures are all very important areas in the world: Victoria Falls in Africa, Iguazu in South America, Khone Papeng in Laos, and Niagara in the USA. But what interested me is that they are all on very important borders: Victoria Falls, for example, is on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe; Iguazu is between Argentina and Brazil, and so on. In the past these border areas have been very important in the establishment of nation-states”.

“Also I very soon discovered that the falls survive because of mass tourism – without it they would probably be lost. They are like parks; but much more similar to Disneyland than Yosemite. For example – at night, when are the lights are off, the water at Niagara is turned down. That means that the water is only intended as a spectacular point of interest. Yes, it is used it to produce electricity underground…but the falls survive because a lot of tourists every day want to see them. It is the same at Iguazu, where the flow of the waterfall is regulated by the famous dam upriver.”

 

 

© Olivo Barbieri

© Olivo Barbieri / Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC

 

Barbieri is best known for the innovative and distinctive Site Specific series of aerial photographs of major world cities including Las Vegas, Shanghai, Rome and Amman. Though taken from a helicopter, the pictures constitute a thorough re-working of the priorities and rationale of aerial photography. His use of a tilt-shift lens creates a single plane of tightly focussed and precisely detailed pictorial content, while rendering the remainder of the image as vaguely realised fields of colour. An unforeseen consequence was that the world began to appear as if it belonged in a toyshop window – “I started to experiment with selective focus, but what was more interesting for me was that I discovered that not only can I decide what is important, but that everything looked like a model.” Further, the intensified colours – especially the saturated greens (“All my generation of photographers was very frustrated because we always got a colour somewhere between a green and a brown. Now we get real green – it’s something very new”) – augmented the apparently unreal, hand-made quality of the scenes.

These techniques are brought to bear on The Waterfall Project with the result that, for example, the 19 million cubic feet of water that cross the crest of the Victoria Falls (per minute) now appear as a pin sharp trickle amidst fields of white haze. Miniature tourists seem to pick their way through forests of cauliflower; swathes of land and water are re-made as colour-saturated smears. If aerial photography is conceived as a means of reconnaissance or surveillance, then these pictures most surely fail.

 

 

© Olivo Barbieri

© Olivo Barbieri / Yancey Richardson Gallery, NYC

 

Barbieri of course has a different agenda – “My idea is to see the falls for the first time, like something new, not like something that has existed for centuries and millennia. I think in The Waterfall Project you can understand that there is something different, but you don’t know exactly what. It is very important because it is a way to see anew these very famous places and areas of the world.”

“You can see it anew; take photographs again, without producing the same old pictures. You have the possibility to take different, interesting pictures – pictures that make you curious to understand…We can consider the world anew. We can see the world anew.”

© Guy Lane, 2008

 

The Waterfall Project – Olivo Barbieri (Damiani, £29.99)