Oliver Mark

Between Skies and Earth
Alv­in Lang­don Coburn & Oliv­er Mark

The light and the obscure, the sky and the earth, the eth­er­e­al and the cor­por­eal. Such jux­ta­pos­i­tions have long formed the essence of the photographer’s art and a mas­tery of these ele­ments can evoke entire uni­verses of nuance and emotion.

Oliv­er Mark (b. Ger­many, 1963) is one of the mod­ern geni­uses in the use of these ele­ments; and Alv­in Lang­don Coburn (b. Amer­ica, 1882; d. Wales, 1966) pos­sessed such a gift in their use that his work forms the found­a­tion of pictori­al­ist pho­to­graphy. CLAIR Gal­lery cur­ated an exhib­i­tion, Between Skies and Earth, that explored the overt and cov­ert con­nec­tions between these two cel­eb­rated pho­to­graph­ers who are sep­ar­ated by more than a century.

CLAIR Gal­lery presen­ted Between Skies and Earth from March 30, 2017 to June 11, 2017 at Franz-Joseph-Strasse 10 in Munich.

Oliv­er Mark is renowned for his por­traits of aris­to­crats, artists, and celebrit­ies. His work has been pub­lished in magazines such as Vogue and Van­ity Fair, while his pho­to­graphs have been exhib­ited in museums around the world. More inform­a­tion avail­able at his artist page or  on his per­son­al website.Alvin Lang­don Coburn was a pion­eer­ing fig­ure in pho­to­graphy and an early mas­ter of pictor­al­ism. He began tak­ing pho­to­graphs as a young child and his career spanned more than six dec­ades. His work bears wit­ness to the rise of the great mod­ern cit­ies and he was fas­cin­ated by the dynam­ic com­plex­ity of these new urb­an envir­on­ments. Coburn had a par­tic­u­lar geni­us for pho­to­graph­ing move­ment, wheth­er it be the eer­ie play of arti­fi­cial and nat­ur­al light at night­fall in New York City or the traces of ped­es­tri­ans seen from a perch high above a Lon­don park. To see more of his work, vis­it his CLAIR artist page.

Anna-Patri­cia Kahn, 2017