David Otruba
As a photographer, I strongly believe that photographs perform a vital role in highlighting the urgent need to halt the destruction of natural habitats essential for sustaining life. Photography serves as a catalyst for prompting a critical revaluation of environmental sustainability. The dual function of photographs, both as representations of reality and conveyors of emotions and ideas, generates creative tensions that inform my personal growth as a reflective practitioner. These tensions also foster interactions with audiences and collaborative endeavours with fellow artists from many different art disciplines. I find it essential to openly engage in discussions on social issues through art. Observation, experimentation, and collaboration serve as my primary methods for critically engaging with environmental issues. The production of compelling aesthetic images serves to draw attention to the paradox of the sublime, a nexus of beauty and fear of environmental destruction.
What Happened to the Canary in the Quarry
What Happened to The Canary in The Quarry explores anthropogenic climate change through a series of landscape photographs. Central to the project are images taken around Dubnica nad Váhom, my hometown, where I have witnessed significant changes of the ‘disappearing’ landscape. An extraction process from the nearby quarries. The transnational location of the quarries in Ireland and Slovakia reflects my own displacement living between two countries, as well as framing this environmental issue in a wider European context. The project uses two visual strategies. On the one hand, there are photographs of quarries where material extraction from the land is visible, a moral sublime, the second variant is inspired by the aesthetics of Romanticism, expressed in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich to evoke the ‘sublime’ effect by juxtaposing humans with the grandeur of the landscape. However, in my approach the landscape is altered by human intervention. The series reflects on the tension of extracting materials from the ground for human development and the critical importance of land preservation and sustainability.
Photobook
What Happened to the Canary in the Quarry explores anthropogenic climate change through a series of landscape photographs. Central to the project are images taken around Dubnica nad Váhom, my hometown, where I have witnessed significant changes in the ‘disappearing’ landscape, an extraction process from the nearby quarries. The transnational location of the quarries in Ireland and Slovakia reflects my own displacement living between two countries, as well as framing this environmental issue in a wider European context.