Michaela Weber

Michaela Weber

Michaela Weber

 

Photographic artist Michaela Weber exclusively implements her own artistic projects. Her primary focus in her conceptual photography is on cultural identities and global change processes. For her artistic projects and series she embarks on worldwide expeditions. Michaela Weber lives and works in Switzerland.

Work Description

From Vanuatu to the Fijis to the Pitcairn Islands: For her elaborate photographic expeditions Michaela Weber moves into the heart of the Pacific Ocean. She photographs magnificent sea landscapes – above and under water – and embraces the exotic wildlife in and around the ocean with enormous closeness. In her photographs she lends dignity to landscapes, revealing their hidden romanticism, sublimity and singularity. In doing so, Michaela Weber does not try to change nature or make it a plaything of her own. She does not distort nature, she does not stage it. Rather, she moves with humility in it and she shifts into areas of life that harbor the core and origin of all life and cultural diversity in the world. When looking at her partially large-format works, the coherence between the habitat and their impact and the human being becomes clear. The ocean shapes the people who live with it. The sea intervenes with the culture of the people, and the culture intervenes with nature. The fact that everything is connected with each other is illustrated by the works of Michaela Weber. Portraits of unfamiliar tribal people, who form a unity with nature, radiate this reciprocal relationship on the human side.

With her photographs, Michaela Weber does not simply glorify the sublime aesthetic beauty of nature alone, nor does she admonish the viewer. The images have no documentary claim, which has often proved to be inflationary in nature photography and monocausal in the message. The power of Michaela Weber’s works unfolds on a much more complex level. They represent the impressive status quo of nature’s grace, which is already part of a transformation process. And this happens without exceptions globally. Photographic art as an outstanding medium has therefore the power to show the importance of this process and to offer the viewer a special access to this topic. With her works Michaela Weber is aware of this responsibility. Her art shows how inconsequential man is in the midst of the violence of his life world. Through the notion that arises with the confrontation of art reveals to the beholder that the human being is capable of changing, destroying and illegally penetrating nature. The works of Michaela Weber show the opposite of a threat to nature and yet the fear of »losing it«.

The work of Michaela Weber also includes epic-looking photographs of icebergs. In no other natural objects in the world is the change in the living space so clearly visible. In their appearance, they condense the creation and sublimity of nature and their seemingly inexhaustible dissipation are at the same time a symbol for the weakened inferiority to climate change. With the example of the iceberg, which on closer inspection shows the shape of a face, the photographs show as an example the cross-sectional relationship of all living spaces. Characters with a special aura exist in nature, the animal and in the human world – from iceberg and polar bear to the tribal member.

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