Talent of the Year 2020 - NOMINEE: Lena Holzer

Due to the rising awareness of global warming, people have become attentive to how society pollutes the planet. We often speak about plastic waste in the ocean, exhaust gas and carbon dioxide and how the aftermath of this pollution is beginning and will continue to negatively affect our living conditions. However, I realized that one important aspect of environmental pollution is often overlooked: light pollution. The intensity and quantity of the countless light sources that illuminate the night blend the vision of the starry sky in most urban areas. This side effect of industrialization has a strong impact on existing ecosystems. The light smog disrupts plants in their natural growth cycles, night active animals such as insects and birds can no longer navigate and perish. The absence of total darkness also significantly influences the human hormone level - more and more people suffer from insomnia and the psychological consequences of it. While the full extent of the negative effects of light pollution on organisms is still being researched, everybody can observe and witness the progressive disappearance of darkness in cities and industrial areas. The photographs of this ongoing project were taken in Warsaw, Poland, which presents one of the most heavily light polluted areas in Europe. The advertisements on the depicted lonely skyscrapers shine in vain throughout the dazzled night. By inverting the images, the light sources become threatening black spots, as if they had burned holes through the photographs. The dullness of gray, which is caused by the light emanating from these buildings, reveals the extent of the pollution. Highlighting Darkness is a typology of urban buildings that have not had a quiet night in a very long time.
Highlighting Darkness is a typology of urban buildings that have not had a quiet night in a very long time.

About author:
Lena Holzer (*1995) is an Austrian designer and photographer, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. She studied Product Design and Visual Communication at the Free University Bolzano in Italy and worked as a photographer and photography teacher for NABA Nuova Academia di Belle Arti in Milan, Italy. Her design projects have been exhibited at the Milano Design Week and published in several magazines and blogs, such as Design Milk. After graduating from her BA she moved back to Austria where she worked for the studio Nina Mair Architecture & Design. Since 2019, Holzer is part of the MA program Photography & Society at the KABK Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Her latest photography project The Impossibility of Future has been featured in The British Journal of Photography and GUP Magazine, and it will be partly published in FOAM Magazine. In her work, Lena Holzer is questioning the concept of meaningfulness through photography. She aims to shine a light on daily phenomena and the often overlooked effects they have on the human psyche.