About Sander Jain
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Sander Jain photography@sanderjain.com / 0151.143.259.10 *1986 Photographer with focus on conservation photography and a love of wild places. - 2005-2008 University of Bonn (Germany) Biology, Philosophy and History of Art student - Since 2008 Working as a professional photographer - 2010-2011 Environmental Photography Project focusing on Clayoquot Sound UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, Vancouver Island, BC, Canada
I consider a photograph to be a door into the viewer's associative and imaginative world. A photograph as an extract of the tangible world around us triggers off a catechism of individual associations, notions and anticipations whose nature depend on the viewer's inside, their personal experiences and development. These personal associations complement the first impression provided by the photograph to the construction of a complete associative world with its own atmosphere, qualities and subjects. Thus, the photograph itself is only the key to the full effect of this medium whose main impact develops in the viewer's mind. This is why my favourite pictures are those which work as a strong stimulus to the viewer and create an atmospheric world that relates to their inside by visually thematising fundamental natural issues that we are all dealing with or feel connected to. I am of course as much a viewer as I am a photographer and therefore, the character of my photographs is shaped by my own inside, my perception of the world, my imagination and depends on my ability to communicate via photographic language. The more fundamental or profound or universal the subject of an image is and the more powerful it is photographically presented, the more thrilled I am and the more I can usually be sure that other viewers relate to it, too and feel the same way. Photography enables me to bring moments in which I see a potential to perfection by unhinging them from the real, coherent world context and presenting these extracts out of their context as keys to more intense, more perfect, complying and self-determined realities. I love pictures that answer or express my claim to reality and have some deepness and mystical elements in them. If everything in a picture were revealed, if everything were light and if there were no dark or undefined parts in them, the magic would be gone and the viewer had nothing to do. The best pictures are those that leave room for our imagination, our notions, fears, wishes, hopes, expectations and longings and make us curious. I usually don‘t restrict myself to a particular photographic field because I‘m interested in many things but I‘m very fascinated with the subject of the power relation of man facing nature. As I consider the conservation of our global environment to be of utmost importance, my aim is to work as a full-time environmental photojournalist. One thing that attracts me to and that I love about nature is the opportunity of experiencing unfathomableness. It is the notion of wilderness which becomes increasingly difficult to experience on our planet due to the depletion of nature and our omnipresence. It is the feeling you get when looking at the dim layers of towering coastal mountains on a dark and misty day, fully covered in soaking wet ancient forest, abundant in life, wafts of mist crawling up their steep slopes in the cold humid air... or when you lie awake in your bed at night and hear the echoing howling of a wolf somewhere far in the distance... and you wonder, what else might wander about the dark vastness out there. It feels like a promise... It is something I live for. As long as this air of unfathomability is present, my fascination of life will last and I can feel at home on Earth. I can only hope that it will never vanish... "We need the tonic of wilderness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of Nature." (Henry D. Thoreau) October 2010
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