Crossing Meridians

Stefan Hagen photographs landscapes according to a technique that best articulates the temporality of life cycles and the experience humans have of nature. He relies on long exposures, and he uses film, printing his photos from negatives. His images are characterized by a blurred quality. While this most recent series of photographs is made according to this practiced technique, Hagen has introduced the human form into his landscapes, signaling for a meeting between nature and humanity. 

Distinct meridians, a set of invisible arcs that span between different points, occurring across the earth and also our bodies, seem to organize Hagen’s photographic interventions. Bodily movements are choreographed to intersect with volatile and harsh earthly formations (salt flats, rocky outcrops, and dry desert plains). These elements are inflected by light as it plays across this landscape. 

Heliography, a photographic method of following the sun, capturing its reverberation in rays and rings of light, inform Hagen’s treatment of the horizon line. He announces this location as a point of focus and attention, where humanity can reply to the monumentality of nature. The horizon signifies the limit of what we can perceive and communicate with directly. 

The mature socialized body is in part realized when a person learns to cross meridians occurring along two axes: down the body’s center and across the body’s middle. We shake-hands, kiss cheeks, hug, or bow, in our acknowledgment of another being’s presence. This physical movement shifts our corporeal understanding from fragmented to associative. The body makes an effort to join two parts, allowing its halves to navigate a new situation or environment.

In each of the photographic sets that compose this series the body moves through a desert setting. Rationalized or not, Hagen has established a system of exchange between the body and nature. He conveys different relationships between the terrestrial and corporeal. 

Diptych No 1, as with subsequent couples, plays with the circle and the square; asserting contrasting symbolic associations – the circle with infinity, the square with a man-made construct. The camera lens is iterated by its inclusion in the image. We see the refraction of the same ray of light that pierces the landscape, as it hits the inner lip of the camera lens. Juxtaposed with this circular image is a squared off image, in which the horizon rests much lower than in its counterpart, and the human form, a dancer is introduced. She plants her feet and radiates her arms. In both images, Hagen captures ways in which meridians activate and organize flows of energy. 

There are thirteen such sets. Each situation, curiously, appears to fixate on at least one meridian and its articulation. In another layout, Diptych No 3, the horizon is definitive. It is an arc that is met head on. In this photograph, Hagen follows and captures the stars casting rings of light towards the earth’s surface. This image is contrasted with a photograph of a male form standing before the moon, alerting the eye to perceive and contemplate a complex multiple axes composed by intersecting elements in the skies, features of the earth, and the human body. 

Our primordial desire to understand how systems are made, and how we feature and factor in these complex structures, comes into play as the narrative unfolds. In one of the last sets in this story, Triptych No 8, the body harnesses the force of light. He wields a torch. He bends at his center, by this motion he shifts how he relates to his surroundings, in effect he gestures a salutation. Provocatively, evoking Prometheus, the dancer asserts his power by offering an alternate source of light to assume a place on the horizon. In the central image of this triptych, we see the original source of his fire and our energy, the sun, captured in the movement of approaching it. The meeting point of the natural and the man-made assert a new junction, an imposed alternate reality. 

Hagen’s photographs convey stories of the experience of journeying through space and time. He has made it his work to capture the details of what is missed or quickly forgotten along the way. This series expands upon this narrative. Its order and logic speak to his effort to convey ways we attempt to address and greet this magnificent force, struggling in that context, desperately trying to grab nature’s attention.

Yasmeen M. Siddiqui