Finalist 2018: Vanja Bucan

“We are romantic nature lovers, we idolise it. But we also exploit it and aestheticize it. In my photos you see this relationship between parts of the body – usually hands – and nature, and you don’t know if you see love or domination between the two.”

Islands of plastic floating on the oceans of the world, air pollution in many cities to a degree never seen before, and species disappearing all over the planet – the reality of how we deal with our environment is so hard to bear that we hang up illusions of nature in waiting rooms and post flower arrangements on Instagram. “Between longing and despair,” is how Vanja Bucan describes her personal relationship to nature. On the one hand, there is the acknowledgement that a large part of her life has been led far from nature, and that she has a quiet longing for a week-end by the lake, and for the childhood spent in the countryside in Slovenia. On the other hand, there is a guilty conscience, and a feeling that purchasing organic and recycling is not doing enough to save a planet that is already so damaged.

For her “Sequences of Truth and Deception” series, Bucan places parts of the human body in front of, or as part of, photographic backdrops where nature is shown intact. This is how the photographer hopes to communicate the tension between idealisation and dominance. Bucan’s images are carefully staged: she supplements and changes the original picture by introducing human gestures and poses. In this manner, she creates a fiction that conveys her attitude towards anthropocentrism. Humanity appears at the centre. Humanity is seen apparently interacting with nature, yet always cut off from it. It is not necessary to know that Bucan has been an environmental activist since she was young to understand her images – but it does help.