Says Diana: Surroundings play a dominant role in shaping experience. I treasure the city and try to make space for quiet contemplation within it. Born out of three ongoing series, this series imagines city dwellers searching for moments of relief in a world shaped by climate change, and the struggle to find a balance between an environment in crisis and manmade structures.
The question of the struggle between nature and the built environment is ever more central in urban life. In these images, relaxed beachgoers find themselves amidst carefully composed urban settings in front of dramatic skies. They search without seeming to find what they are looking for. The beach becomes rising tides, threatening the very foundation of the city. The clash of nature and city results in an absurd profusion of visual noise and little relief. The resulting images lay bare challenges to both my urban fantasy and to city planners, and the problematic nature of the future that lies ahead for humanity and the planet.
Diana Cheren Nygren is a fine art photographer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her work explores the visual character of place defined through physical environment and weather. Place has implications for our experience of the world, and reveals hints about the culture around it.
Diana was trained as an art historian with a focus on modern and contemporary art, and the relationship of artistic production to its socio-political context. Her emphasis on careful composition in her photographic work, as well as her subject matter, reflects this training.
Her current project, When the Trees are Gone, has been featured in Dek Unu Mag and Square Magazine, won Best In Show in the exhibition Nurture/Nature juried by photographer Laura McPhee, the Grand Prize in Photography from Art Saves Humanity, and is a finalist for Fresh2020. Her photographs have received numerous honorable mentions from the Lucie Foundation and have been included in a number of juried exhibitions at Subjectively Objective, PhotoPlace Gallery, the Midwest Center for Photography, Rhode Island Center for Photographic Arts, PH21 Gallery in Budapest, Arlington Center for the Arts, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the Curated Fridge.
