Catskill-based photographer Alon Koppel has been taking pictures all his life. When he's not busy working as an architectural and art documentation photographer, you will most likely find him at specific spots along the Hudson, taking pictures when the light is right.
Employing a maritime app, he tracks ships coming and going on the Hudson River and makes a conscious effort to ensure that what the camera sees is exactly the same on different days, seasons, and weather conditions. His photographs show the movement of man through natural landscapes and are imbued with a meditative quality that reveals nature's perpetual changes.
Always using a Canon R5 digital camera on a tripod and a set of ND (natural density) filters, which he compares to putting sunglasses on his camera, Koppel achieves long exposure times that create abstract stripes. With a nod to the Hudson River School Painters, the blurred results look almost like the brush strokes of paintings. "Photography is about capturing a scene in the right light. The mundane can look amazing in the morning glow, so I cross the river according to the time of day and light conditions. This is done in appreciation and awareness of the works by the Hudson River School, whose founder Thomas Cole's home is just up the hill from where I live. In my work, waiting for the ship to pass at the right moment, when the light is just perfect, is an extension of Thomas Cole and Frederic Church's attempts at capturing the sublime American landscape," he says.
"When I photograph from the Catskill side, the ship's image appears just in front of Olana, Frederic Church's home up on the hill. Photographing from this spot in the afternoon reveals Olana in its full evening glory, the sun bouncing off both the industrial ship traffic and the stately building behind it. The modern-day ship literally and figuratively disrupts the natural world," he adds.
Through trial and error, Koppel has learnt to predict how long an exposure will be needed and how it will work at different times of day, resulting in how a train or a ship will look when it passes. Koppel's photographs often appear in a series instead of just a single image. His work reflects both the exposure time of a specific image and shows how time changes the landscape and the environment over a longer duration.
For example, in one of his favorite locations, near the city of Hudson, trees were lost to storms and decay. His photographs from 2021 and from 2024, from the same vantage point, reflect these subtle, environmental changes.
Diptychs from his "Locomotion" and "Shipping Lane" series are part of the group show "This Must Be the Place?" at Mad Rose Gallery in Millerton, which will be exhibited May 9 through June 9. Koppel's photographs will be on display together with Lee Day and Jada Fabrizio (whose work appeared on the cover of the January issue of Chronogram), with an opening party Saturday, May 11 from 4 to 7pm.
Koppel's photos will be further complemented by the inclusion of maritime maps displaying each photographed ship's journey around the world over the course of a year.
He sums up his work saying, "I believe the beauty of the Hudson Valley is evident, yet human intervention is omnipresent. I hope the work can invite the viewer to recognize the effect of the constant commercial traffic around the world and the effects of consumerism and consumption on the natural world."
