Wolf Kettler
- Michael Hanna
- Apr 5
- 2 min read
Wolf Kettler is a landscape and figurative photographer who has exhibited in Europe and the United States. Notable exhibitions include solo and collective shows at Schloss Puchberg in Wels, Austria, Atelier Café in Steyr, Austria, Sunprint Gallery in Madison, Wisconsin, Sashay Gallery in Devizes, England, and Galerie Biesenbach, Köln, Germany. He is author of the book Photography & Realism and has been interviewed by the BBC. Wolf has been featured in books such as An Imperfect Garden and Night Sky.
Focusing on both poetic landscapes and erotic photography, Wolf Kettler usually chooses to capture his subjects in black and white. His photographs utilizes no Photoshop alteration and is without digital alteration with the exception of his Symmetry series. The landscapes, which often depict gardens and the English countryside, are often covered in sfumato and natural mist of the weather. Much like an apparition, these haunting and mysterious landscapes appear to have an almost unreal quality to them, as if imagined or painted, rather than captured.
The figurative photography often evokes sensuality in terms of domination, some of the works are far more suggestive than others, and often cropped to ‘tease’ the viewer as to what lies beyond the surface of the lens. His strongest photographs seem to be of isolated trees amongst the mist of fog on the open landscape. The skies in these particular photos appear minimalist and expansive in uniformity while the foliage of the trees seem to blend seamlessly into the open sky. The black and white photography offers a monochromatic unity to these surfaces giving off an impression as if the photographs were captured through breath on surface rather than by camera.
Euonymus Alatus (pictured above) remains part of his An Imperfect Garden series employing color photography instead of his usual black and white. The intimate scene depicts bright colored foliage against the open mist of what appears to be an early morning fog. The pink shrub in the foreground appears painterly and pale while the distant wheat shrub appears to vanish into the horizon despite not being a far distance from the camera. To the top remains a piece of tree branch with high contrast offering a balance to the overall low saturation of the composition.
Wolf Kettler expresses the poetry of the garden, the landscape, and the sensual form. His work can be described as an individualistic interpretation of behaviors and environments as he captures intimate compositions either through conceptual cropping or specific weather patterns. The naturalistic and ‘organic’ process of capturing these unaltered photographs offers an immersion into a low saturated or high contrast environment, depending on the subjects, revealing poetic inclinations on the philosophical purpose of these images. Wolf Kettler strides through his motifs turning them into frozen compositions of mist, tension, and mystery.
