Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Alex Cretey Systermans | Slowdown "Both freedom of choice and intelligence are constantly challenged by high standards of immediacy. Speed has now become our main environment. We don't live in a geography no more but into the world time." Paul Virilio (interviewed by Le Monde de l'Education, May 2001) Nature takes its time. And sometimes we are forced to slowdown ourselves. Slowdown is a reflection on time and thoughts about perception of time . A collection of images about slowing down, contemplation, and the (political) desire to remind us how fast we live. The series puts together pictures of vegetation (classic latin "vegetus" = "lively","fertile" or "vegetatio" = "excitation, movement") and images of constrained, stranded, prostrated livings, stopped in their deep thoughts, in their anxiety, daydreaming with a "thousand yards stare". The slow life of nature here reminds us, with this slowness, in its time scale, how much our own speed is vanity.