By Kiša Lala
Jeff Bark, Lucifer Falls, Courtesy of artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery
In Jeff Bark’s new series, Lucifer Falls, the water falls like a jug of milk poured over rocks, cascading down, eerily quiet in a landscape made unfamiliar – as though a gateway into a magical Shangri La – and not the parks of upstate New York, where they were actually shot.
I asked Jeff Bark why he chose to photograph waterfalls, a subject favoured by kitschy calendars and difficult to make original. Obsessing with control over his environment, Bark toiled in his studio, building sets for ‘landscapes,’ whose unsurprising outcomes led him to take the project to the road. Bark wanted to reach beyond the scope of traditional nudes and landscapes, “I wanted to take on something that was overly done. Anyone can take a picture of a waterfall – the only way I could make it different was by controlling the light.”
