Karianne Bueno is a 38 years old Dutch artist based in Amsterdam, where she also teaches photography at the FotoAcademie. Her work explores the relationship of photography with reality/fiction and time. Among the richness of her photographs, we decided to give you a pick of Doug’s Cabin, a series that should be available in a book form this year.
Karianne first discovered photography when she came across a portrait of a music-hero, she was star-strucked as if the musician was actually there. She finally started taking pictures of the landscape around her, and learned better about looking at the world thanks to photographers like William Eggleston and Stephen Shore. Using its specific qualities, Karianne believes in the power of the medium to tell stories.
Doug’s Cabin project takes us into the footsteps of Doug, a man that has been living in the forest of Vancouver Island for 47 years. Doug runs a primitive campground in the remote rain forest, where an extended group of nineteenth-century pioneers tried to build their lives and failed. The place is charged with history: most of the buildings on Doug’s campground belong to an old military radar base, originally built to protect Canada and the U.S. from a potential Russian attack during Cold War. As shown in the photographs, Doug saved whatever he could from the fire that burnt the military village down: wooden shacks, bowling pins, books and toys.
“Doug’s Cabin is about contemporary man’s duality towards wilderness; about the timeless, persistent belief in the feasibility of life and our futile fight against its transitory nature. The project contains over a hundred photographs, (self-written) texts, drawings (by Medy Oberendorff), objects and found footage”.
Playing with diaries, fiction, letters, legends, Karianne also pays special attention to the text to add context to the story. If you read between the lines they give a lot of extra information about her subjects and motives, such as this inspiring story behind Doug’s Cabin photographs that we encourage you to read.
Karianne’s projects are available on her website.
[EDIT 2018/11/21] Doug’s Cabin will have his 180 pages book of photographs, found footage, self-written texts and drawings. It will be published by Eriskay Connection. A crowdfunding campaign is running at https://www.voordekunst.nl/projecten/6029-dougs-cabin-1 to help raise funds for the production.
