For me, certain places have a strong emotional resonance - particularly places of ruins or other echoes of a human presence now vanished or wild or bucolic places where human presence, if found at all, seems distinctly secondary. Since photography bears direct witness to its subject matter, it creates a kind of intimacy between image and subject and gives it unique ability to visually communicate new subjective and emotional truths about places that may not be readily apparent even to visitors. At its best, it invites viewers to reconstruct these places in their imaginations with a heightened sense of their emotional pull.
Peter Axilrod has been photographing landscapes and remains of past civilizations all over the world for many years, focusing on places that are removed to one degree or another from modern daily life - places that generally have more to do with nature, myth or the past. His images have been exhibited in New York City, Durham North Carolina and Lyme Connecticut. They also reside in numerous personal and corporate collections in both the United States and the Republic of Korea.
The silver gelatin prints of my photographs were generally made directly from medium format black and white film negatives in a collaborative process between photographer and printer. Some were made from contact negatives derived from digital images using a similar collaborative process (these are noted separately). Except where otherwise noted, the black and white images exhibited in this website are JPEGs derived from higher density digital scans of the original silver gelatin prints and cannot fully convey the originals' resolution or tonal qualities. Where noted, some black and white images presented in this website are pure digital images, but silver prints may be made from contact negatives derived from them.
