Ecotone

The Body as Transitional Zone

Where skin ends and environment begins — and the impossibility of drawing that line.

En ecología, un ecotone is the zone where two ecosystems meet: the strip of ground where forest becomes meadow, where fresh water meets salt. Ecotones are not boundaries; they are negotiations. They are where the highest biological diversity occurs, because two logics overlap. Ecotone photographs the nude body as exactly this kind of zone — the place where the human and the non-human are not separate but continuous.The theoretical ground for the series is Donna Haraway’s concept of natureculture: the recognition that nature and culture are not opposites, that every meadow is partly human and every human is partly geological. Tim Ingold’s anthropology of walking, Anna Tsing’s writing on contaminated landscapes, Val Plumwood’s ecofeminism — these are the frames within which the series has developed. What they share is a refusal of the picturesque tradition in which “nature” exists as an untouched backdrop for human presence. In Ecotone, there is no backdrop. The body and the environment are in the same image, at the same ontological level.This puts the series in tension with a long art-historical lineage it could be mistaken for: the pastoral nude. From Titian’s Bacchanal to Cameron and Stieglitz to the countless workshop photographs of bodies-in-meadows, the nude in landscape has been a tool for producing an image of harmony, nostalgia, or transcendence. Ecotone does not disavow these images; it holds them alongside harder work — figures among rocks, bodies walking into coastal wind, subjects whose presence is continuous with a working landscape rather than a romantic one — and asks the viewer to sit with the full range.

Animals, when they appear, are not symbols or props. The horses, in particular, are photographed as fellow subjects: they share the frame without being subordinated to the human figure. The compositions are built to refuse the hierarchy that usually separates figure from ground. No one is the protagonist.

Ecotone - Galería



Subseries y ediciones

Ecotone includes two related projects. Solo tú estás cerca cuando todo está lejos. extends the series’ engagement with grasslands and mountain landscapes. Landsnude was presented as a group curatorial exhibition at Artcore Gallery, Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2015, with the artist acting as curator and lead photographer.

Archival pigment prints are released in limited editions of 5 + 1 Artist Proof on Hahnemühle Photo Rag and Baryta papers. Selected works are available through Artsper, Arte Saatchiy Artmajeur. Para consultas directas, préstamos para exposiciones o precios para coleccionistas: print@burakbulut.org.