Daniel Kovalovszky's unearthly landscapes
Hungarian photographer subverts conventional landscape photography with uncannily uniform forest shots
The 35-year-old photographer Daniel Kovalovszky has been shooting forests for the past three years. Yet his series, Green Silence, are about as far from the woodland-glade clichés as you can get.
"I had no intention to create conventional masterpieces taken from nature," says the Budapest-born photographer. "I didn't want to take advantage on the cheap chances nature offered. All I wished for was to give myself over to solitude, to the weird shape shifting of time as it was slackening its pace."
In his photos, shot deep within both deciduous and coniferous forests at different points in the year, natural arboreal formations take on unexpectedly uniform, near-abstract patterns - patterns that Kovalovkszky describes as "those perfect details of nature that are deeply hidden from our civilization."
After graduating from high school, Kovalovsky, who still lives in Budapest, studied portrait photography and photojournalism. He has been working as a photographer since 2001, shooting documentary work, which often deals with the ageing process and the legacy of Hungary's Soviet years.
Green Silence makes for a welcome break from the melancholy shots of declining local industry. "When I step into the land of trees ,then I can fully give myself over to this peaceful search, and abandon the manmade world," says Kovalovsky. Even if the pictures take on an unusually orderly form.
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