Sophie Ristelhueber...

from: www.blancpain-artcontemporain.ch

 Sophie Ristelhueber is a very well known war photographer. She looks at the aftermath of a war although she has a very different approach to it than most war photographers. She takes photographs from the sky so that there is no reference to scale any more. It almost makes it seem as though she is taking photographs of animal traces. Her photographs appear to be very calm while at the same time commenting on the catastrophe that has happened below. "For more than 20 years, Sophie Ristelhueber has been working on the notion of the territory and its history, by paying special attention to ruins and the traces left by man in places devastated by war. She focuses on revealing events and the marks of history, both on bodies and on landscapes." (http://www.guardian.co.uk)

From: www.flickr.com by xpunklovex

As you can see from the image on the left, Ristelhuebers' photographs were printed off on a very large scale and lots of them. It again emphasizes the idea that you cannot reference what the scale of the photographs could be. If you had no idea what kind of photographs she takes, you wouldn't think that they were the remains of a war landscape! "Often playing with an ambiguity of scale in her installations, Ristelhueber’s work confounds traditional photographic genres. She unsentimentally draws attention to the scars and traces we leave behind, addressing the essence of our human existence" (www.photonet.org.uk). "Ristelhueber hangs the large prints in an expansive grid that at first reads as a beautiful abstract field, then reveals itself to be a reconstitution of the battlefield on the gallery wall." (www.moma.org).