Renate Aller: Ocean | Desert

Far from the vibrant urban worlds where I’ve often photographed, I followed the subtle movements of time and tide, wind and water. Meanwhile, Rebecca photographed the waves of light as they washed through our house of many windows—and wrote spare text pieces to try to emotionally navigate this unsettling time, when so many we know have been caught in its undertow.

– Alex Webb (May 2021)

Inspired by Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Waves, this collaborative project brings together the work of creative partners Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb. The intimate collection serves as a pandemic logbook in words and images, created while the couple was largely sequestered on Cape Cod from March 2020 through May 2021. Rebecca provides original, hand-written poetry that punctuates her lyrical photographs and Alex’s panoramic seascapes. Their images serve as poignant meditations on what it means to be both deeply connected to the world around us and profoundly isolated from much that we hold dear.

Learn more about the accompanying limited edition HERE.

Since moving to New England in 1984, Barbara Bosworth has been photographing the sea and its awe-inspiring ability to transform sky, water, and light. The sea evokes calm introspection, romance, and poetry, while remaining a deeply unknowable and overpowering natural force, a contradiction that has drawn people to the shoreline for millennia. Before she discovered photography, and for as long as she can remember, Bosworth has been looking at the sea. Many hours were spent with her father watching the light move across Cape Cod Bay.

Later in life, she walked those same beaches with the wonder that had been passed down by her father, as well as generations of writers, poets, and artists. This book of photographs of the sea, made with an 8x10 camera, follows in the tradition of The Meadow and The Heavens, serving as the third and final volume in the series, keeping the same size and design elements as the previous two publications.

Limited Edition for this book is sold out.

Simultaneous, multiple activities on sloping sand hills appear as if layers of different people and activities were choreographed next to rolling waves of the sea.

German-born photographer Renate Aller’s Ocean | Desert is an extension of the ongoing series and sold-out book Oceanscapes (Radius Books, 2010). Aller has continued to make images of the ocean from a single vantage point, for which she is internationally known; for the last several years, she has also photographed sand dunes in New Mexico and Colorado.

In Ocean | Desert, Aller pairs the resulting images in a fascinating new series that continues her investigation into the relationship between Romanticism, memory, and landscape in the context of our current socio-political awareness. There is both a visual and visceral relationship between the two bodies of work, as though the minerals of the sand dunes carry the memory of the ocean waters that were there millions of years before. The desert images also capture visitors to the dunes, who engage in beach activities far away from any large body of water. 

Renate Aller made the monumental, yet intimate photographs in Mountain Interval from locations across six continents—mountains as high as 22,500 feet (adjacent to Mount Everest) to the European glaciers and mountain peaks of her childhood vacations. 

Similar to the sand dune images from Ocean | Desert (2014), the artist engages us with these giants in all their detail, the veins and textures of the rocks in their constantly transient state. Aller isolates the mountain from its expected surroundings, using and presenting the familiar and the known in an intimate way, relating to parallel realities from different locations, opening up conversations between the different (political) landscapes in which we live.

Limited edition for this book is sold out.