Vivian Ammerlaan’s photographic work consists of constructed landscapes and elements. It’s her personal search to depict the sublime, the feeling of awe and terror. Because transcendental nature cannot be captured with documentation in her opinion, she uses the method of staging in order to depict her feelings.

To her the sublime is everything that can’t be put into word or image; everything that is of enormous and undying beauty, and therefore extremely frightening. It is about the places where you can feel overpowered with awe and terror: like giant cliffs, mountain ranges or ocean views.

Everything she creates revolves around this concept. Working in this theme, she treads a modern path in a tradition already centuries old (like Romanticism and traditional landscape photography). A tradition she admires and criticizes at the same time. To give image to these places and the feelings they can stir in you, she uses the method of staging and builds table-top settings in a studio. Creating wilderness and untouched places with her own hands seems paradoxical, and it is. It has become part of the work and her position, because to her it only confirms how impossible it is to portray this subject.