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.”

Jeff Bark, Lucifer Falls, Courtesy of artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery

Jeff Bark, Lucifer Falls, Courtesy of artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery

Light and lakes were what he grew up around in Minnesota, and so when with the help of a location scout he came to this place in Northern New York near Canada, he felt a sense of connection with the landscape. Just as he was leaving a state park he saw a tiny sign pointing to ‘Lucifer Falls.’ The name spurred him on.

“There are a lot of colleges, its near Cornell, and tons of students commit suicide. They plunge themselves into the gorge…”

It seems a beautiful place to die. In this place, surrounded by the majesty of the falls, Jeff Bark’s photographs communicate the anguish of ending one’s life. “It also makes you feel how small you are, how fragile; nature comes back so fast…plants overtake the earth; here there is also the purity of cleansing yourself,” says Bark.

Bark would shoot when it was raining out, or about to, and when everything was saturated in the evening or first thing in the morning, 5am, when there was no light. Sometimes he triggered smoke bombs in the valley to mist the air. Getting the shot, he says, “is sometimes a crap-shoot – I wanted to take it without vegetation and finish shooting before Spring came. And it was cold, and rainy… sometimes when I am shooting these things, the light leaks, the light seems to be disappearing, light accidentally exposes the film …”

“You have to walk in at night, he continues, “the sun rises so fast sometimes and if the light touches the picture it becomes more like those clichéd pictures – I did take some, but I wanted to shoot a landscape with emotion,” says Bark.

Jeff Bark, Lucifer Falls, Courtesy of artist and Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery

In one picture, I observe a girl with a stone tied around her neck, and in another, a figure suffocates under a sheet of plastic. Bark points out that under a waterfall one can’t breathe very well, it’s overwhelming; they are struggling on the verge, glimpsing at eternity.

Bark tells me, “I always thought photography was so easy…if someone else can take the picture than I am not trying hard enough.” Brash though he might be, Bark follows through with his bite. He can bend something provocative to a work that is poignant and amusing.

Bark controls his palette by limiting it, building the set say, around the colours of a dirty baby carriage he finds, which forms his code base for the series.

That is perhaps why his photographs are governed by a dramatic sense of light, a Caravaggio light that makes the passage from dark to the pale ethereal bodies the light exposes so revelatory; he reveals veins underneath skin, “there is no light on the people, I light the air around them, but it never really touches them… The illumination of the whole picture comes from the body.”

The figures appear transcendent, psychically displaced. Their faces are hidden, and they are wearing the same tunic, as though they had just left the hospital, or have found themselves awake in their nightgowns in a dreamscape.

“People have said that it was taking pictures of something they already had in their brains, like a dream, and I was showing them the picture of it…”

In the second installment of this interview, Jeff Bark speaks of his earlier works, Flesh Rainbow and Abandon.

Jeff Bark’s Lucifer Falls is on view at Hasted Hunt Kraeutler Gallery, September 9 – October 16, 2010, 537 West 24th Street, New York City

The "Hotel" Series by Erwin Olaf

Through March 20, 2010, Chelsea’s Hasted Hunt Kraeutler gallery will be displaying the latest exhibition by Dutch sensation Erwin Olaf. “Hotel, Dawn & Dusk” is a retrospective look at the photographer from 2004–2009, and focuses on his attention to his subjects at their most intimate.

The “Hotel” series looks at vulnerable subjects in various states of undress in seedy, retro hotel rooms. Scorned lovers, forgotten companions, and protagonists have all taken up residence in these rooms, from Raleigh, North Carolina to Kyoto, Japan, and all leave something to be desired. One can find solace in their loneliness, or at least satisfaction in not being them.

The “Dawn” series offers a whimsical and somewhat sterile look at a Victorian household with twiggy model types looking like they just walked off the runway at last month’s Paris couture shows.

Both the “Grief” and the “Rain” series look like an early Matthew Weiner storyboard for a Mad Men episode.

"The Mother," 2009, from the "Dawn" series

"The Boardroom," 2004, for the "Rain" series

"Caroline," 2007, from the "Grief" series