Olaf Otto Becker has been photographing landscapes for more than 30 years. He has undertaken numerous expeditions for this purpose, often alone, sometimes under extreme weather conditions in the Arctic. "Reading the Landscape", the title of one of his photo series, can be taken as a motto for his work: The "reading of the landscape", the visual exploration, is at the centre.
Since the beginning of the century, he has travelled on expeditions to the places on our planet where the consequences of climate change and overexploitation of geo-resources can be observed most painfully for his multi-award-winning photo series and photo books. He travelled 450 kilometres on foot across the melting ice sheet of Greenland, the west coast of which he had previously circumnavigated alone in a boat with his large-format camera.
For over six years, he travelled repeatedly with scientists and environmental activists in Indonesia and Malaysia to see the rainforests and what is left of them. Most recently, he went undercover to photograph the thawing permafrost landscapes in the Siberian summer and the harbour town of Tiksi on the Arctic Ocean, whose last remaining inhabitants are hoping that global warming will allow their town to flourish again.
Olaf Otto Becker's artistic landscape photographs, which are characterised by a monumental depiction of the motifs and an extreme wealth of detail, have recently been shown in Reykjavik, Amsterdam, London, Austin, Berkeley and Seoul and are represented in renowned collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., the National Museum of Photography in Copenhagen and the art collection of the German Bundestag.
The large exhibition with 69 photographic works by Olaf Otto Becker is a contribution to the thematic focus "Climate and Sustainability" in the Dresden Technology Collections.
Olaf Otto Becker, born 1959, 1981 - 1986 studied communication design, philosophy and religious studies. Has worked as a freelance designer and photographer since 1988. Lives in Bad Tölz, Germany and travels on expeditions.
