At first glance you would think Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman’s work is trying to find beauty in the urban landscape. What is harder to decipher is that Edwin builds these intricate scenes himself from memory with models. Since it is done from memory, with no other point of reference, each image becomes almost like an alter reality; a city he has created out of his mind.

In this day and age where most people rely on Photoshop to do this kind of construction, it is good to see someone is still doing this sort of thing by hand. It reminds me of all the miniatures made for movie special effects pre-CGI. I can not imagine the time it must have taken to create some of these scenes. Large photographic prints were made for his show in the United Kingdom, Tales from the Grid, which ends on May 6th.

Review by CR Blog; Remodeling the World:

…The 35-year-old Zwakman was recently voted one of the 21 most important photographers of the 21st century by Contemporary Magazine.

“As I reconstruct the world, I work entirely from memory,” he explains. “I never use photographs or other reference material. All the places, objects and buildings I have seen morph into new variations. Scale and perspective change as well: the images do not show what one could photograph in such situations, but how one experiences and remembers them.”