Daniel Gustav Cramer
Tales 100 (Anafi), 2018

Using landscape as a starting point (a turquoise sea, a pine forest, a mountain lake), the works of Daniel Gustav Cramer take the form of micro-tales whose meaning gradually becomes clear through the succession of images. The ‘Tales’ series, begun in 2000, combines photographic sequences organized in diptychs, triptychs or larger groups of images. In each sequence, an ordinary landscape is photographed from a distance, generally featuring a discreet element somewhere in the scene. From one image to the next, this element moves or changes, thereby constituting the central thread of a story: a dog by the side of a road, watching the passers-by, a ray of sun glinting on snow-covered ground, a boat sailing over the water until it disappears out of the frame… The artist shows how places are shaped by the people who live in them and pass through them and vice versa. Even without a human figure, the spectator is invited to perceive traces of activity, to imagine what is going on there, to imagine himself there.

Text, slightly edited, excerpted from the press release for Daniel Gustav Cramer’s exhibition Tales, at Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain, Brest, 25 October, 2024 – 25 January, 2025.