Roger Generazzo is a photographer and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. He earned his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, NY. His photographic practice is an exploration into the origin of a landscape – the way a place exists simultaneously as a physical site and a sanctuary of memory. He is drawn to environments characterized by their stillness and their structural complexity – landscapes like the woodland of the Fontainebleau Forest in France or the waterways of New York City, where the land and water serve as silent witnesses to the passage of time. His work seeks to reveal the atmospheric and physical essence of these global sites, transforming vast, external realities into contemplative experiences. In an era of rapid environmental transition, he tries to suggest through his images that we all need to be mindful of our landscapes and spaces because they are constantly being reshaped by human activity and climate forces.
His work has been exhibited across the United States, including the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA, Photo Center NW, Seattle, WA, Allegany Museum, Cumberland, MD, Katona Museum of Art, Katona, NY, New York Photo Festival, Brooklyn, NY, Dumbo Arts Festival, Brooklyn, NY, Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, CO, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Novato, CA. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The Photo Review and Fraction Magazine, and has been supported from multiple awards, grants and scholarships.
This project is a photographic survey and personal reflection on the states of the waterways and their adjacent landscapes of New York City. Most people are aware of the two major waterways, the Hudson and East Rivers. However, fewer know of the over seventy other waterways flowing around the city’s five boroughs. These bays, basins, rivers and creeks used to be major transportation waterways, filled with every type of sailing ship, carrying cargo, commuters and travellers daily to and from the city. Up to the middle of the 20th Century, the city's harbor overflowed with commerce and life, contributing to the city’s economic prosperity and worldwide reputation. However, due to technological developments over time, the use of ships and the prosperity of the waterways changed. As vehicle, locomotive and air transportation expanded at a phenomenal pace to transport goods, machinery and commuters, the use of ships dramatically declined. Over years, the companies whose factories lined the waterways leaked contaminants into the water and soil, jeopardizing the health of the water supply and the plant and animal life in it. In addition, the city itself dumped along miles of shoreline garbage and hazardous wastes, which also contaminated the soil and water. Following this, the activities and vitality around the waterfronts eventually waned. Without being used and cared for, the docks and piers deteriorated to rubble. For over seven years, I have photographed the positive and negative effects of human impact along these waterways. My hope is that this project may instigate in the viewer an appreciation for and a desire to visit the city’s waterways. I also hope this project offers the viewer the opportunity to contemplate how the landscape bears our history and holds the key to understanding our culture and identity. Everything we are is in the layers of the land.
I imagined that the landscape of Benevento would look like the idyllic and stunning landscape of Florence, as I had seen it in the charming movie A Room with a View. My ancestors had lived and worked for centuries in this small Italian province, situated about 150 miles southeast of Rome. So I dreamed of seeing immaculate churches, perfectly built pensiones and villas, cultivated fields of crops, and the thriving nature of forests, meadows and olive groves. However, what I saw there, while photographing periodically over five years, appeared nothing like that. Whenever I gazed around the Benevento landscape, I wondered if my ancestors had left the region at the end of the 19th Century because of the same economic hardships I witnessed stretching across it. Since the world financial crisis of 2008, Italy itself has endured a severe economic recession, and everyone has suffered because of it. The government today is still trying to climb out of it. Yet in the midst of a landscape filled with such atrophy and emptiness, I discovered beauty.
For a number of years, I’ve photographed the Fontainebleau Forest, a 50,000-acre woodland 60 kilometers south of Paris, France, the place where the Barbizon artists of the 19th Century – Corot, Rousseau, Le Gray, Cuvelier – had created their well-known work. On the first trip, my approach was to expose its natural landscape and to capture similar scenes with tall oak trees, large sandstone boulders, and luscious clearings. But while there, and during each subsequent visit, I was confronted with a paradox: the forest emerged not only wild and impressive but also controlled and depleted.
Since the 19th Century, Fontainebleau Forest has been a widely consumed and trampled area. Due to train transportation in the 1840s and Claude-Francois Denecourt, who developed a forest travel guide, its thousands of walking paths and numerous monuments, the forest became a grand social destination and huge tourist attraction. People traversed its paths, rode through on bikes and horses, and enjoyed its natural surroundings. In fact, over eleven million people still do each year.
Today, Fontainebleau Forest is a national forest, protected from deforestation and biodiversity loss and recognized as a UNESCO site. Nevertheless, 40,000 cubic meters of trees are still cut down per year without equal reforestation, and multiple recreational activities take place within, including rock climbing with over 200 courses, which erode the forest grounds and the surfaces of the boulders. These two actions alone are huge detriments to the fight against environmental decay and climate change.
While three-quarters of the Earth’s landscape, according to the United Nations, has been controlled or altered by human activity, not all activity may be negative. The Office of National Forests reported fifteen new tree species have been planted to improve Fontainebleau Forest. Is this positive? Through this ongoing study of Fontainebleau Forest, I strive to expose its existing landscape and to reveal the positive and negative effects of human impact upon it. Perhaps the more we see, the more we can question and understand.