Zeitlandschaft is a series of photographic works that captures Time. The title, chosen as the German word for Timescape, makes poetic use of German’s agglutinative linguistic feature. Containing the word landscape within it (landschaft), Zeitlandschaft is exactly that— Landscape photographs of Time itself. The formal parameters of this series remain simple, even as the visual effect moves in and out of abstraction: These are photographs, not digital renderings. Their composition is true to the practical use of the camera in that moment.

The first iterations of Zeitlandschaft appear as wide landscapes with both a foreground in close proximity and a distant background. Here motion blur gives a sharp distinction between the two. The proximal reality, experienced as what is here and now, is rendered as a wiping away of the present to reveal the permanence of nature. Some iterations wink at Richter’s wiping away of paint— a constant state of revealing. These photographs invite a similar formal interpretation. A wiping way to reveal a bigger picture, though the Zeitlandschaft is captured and completed with a single shutter actuation. Civilizations pass, human intervention corrodes and disappears; then, a reassimilation with the wholeness of nature.

This study develops into increasingly abstract photographs through manipulations of the lens, camera apparatus, and various refractions of light. Still captured in a single actuation without digital augmentation, these images surpass the linearity of the initial Zeitlandshcaften (pl) in exchange for an observation of time’s cyclical and circular nature.

A radical and ongoing exploration of documents of Time, these works exemplify Tamez’s relationship with the nonphysical as her primary subjects.