Lukas Felzmann
Swiss, 1959-

Swarm 92-15, 2011 (printed 2014)
gelatin silver print
20 x 16 in.

Promised gift of the artist



Lukas Felzmann - undated photo

"When I photograph, I don’t understand what is going on. And I don’t even try to, because if you’re too intellectually invested in the picture you’re making, you’re probably not getting it. You have to, in a way, just let [it] happen." - Lukas Felzmann

COMMENTS

“The buzz word is swarm intelligence, which has acquired an unforeseen reality in the era of Facebook and Twitter. The behavior of a collective without a center has become a social phenomenon, which is not only of interest to natural scientists, but also particularly to politicians and economists.” (Peter Pfrunder in his contribution to the book)

Swarm is a breathtaking photographic series exploring the flock movements of migrating birds. The photographs offer a unique view of the beauty but also the complexity and diversity of shape variations. A swarm sitting on the ground mirrors the surface of the earth like a skin, but as soon as it lifts up it becomes a fluid three-dimensional system in constant flux. This aerial ballet reveals a rhythm of upward explosion and downward, cascading movement. At times the forms seem to explode, blooming like flowers or expanding outward like fireworks. At other times they appear more stable, slowly drifting like a negative image of stellar constellations. Swarm looks up into the sky and follows flight through the dynamic landscape of streams of air.

http://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/en/swarm

Lukas Felzmann was born and educated in Zürich Switzerland, and holds a MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. He has taught photography at the California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute and at Stanford University since 1993. His photographs have been shown in Europe, Egypt, Columbia and the United States.

Lukas Felzmann’s early works were Installations with Sculptures and Photographs. More recently the work has focused on photography with a special interest in bookmaking and publishing. Lukas Felzmann’s first Monograph “Landfall” was published in 2004 by Lars Muller Publishers and was accompanied by a retrospective at the Fotostiftung Schweiz in Winterthur. Among recent work has been a photographic exploration of the Sacramento Valley as place and as metaphor by documenting a marsh altered through agriculture. In the work images and ideas about landscape, as well as natural and cultural conditions intersect. This work resulted in two large monographs both published by Lars Muller Publishers in 2009 and 2011. The two books form a conceptual pair with the first one “Waters in Between” with texts by John Berger looking down at the conditions on the ground. The second one “Swarm” with texts by Deborah Gorden and Wallace Stevens among others, looks up at the movements of flocks of birds. A fourth book “Helix” with a text by Edgar Allen Poe was published by Cavallo Point in 2009.

Lukas Felzmann is interested in all forms of cultural expressions, particularly music, the visual arts, architecture, bookmaking and how they intersect with the natural world. His teaching embraces both digital and analogue tools and is strongly influenced by his practice as an artist.

http://art.stanford.edu/people/lukas-felzmann