Project Information

Informed by changing climate, history and culture, I will make evocative night landscape photographs in below-sea-level areas and the related infrastructure in central Netherlands. The goal is to visualize environmental transformation occurring in these communities since climate-related statistics can be difficult to grasp

The project is centered around sites in Flevoland, Nationaal Park Nieuw Land, and Zeeland. Significant portions of the country have been reclaimed from the sea or it is vulnerable to water rise due to climate change. An intricate system of pumping stations–some more than one hundred years old–is part of the constant fight against rising water.  

The resulting photographs will be exhibited as an enduring document, and a portion of any print sales will be donated back to the community. 

Research is crucial to the process and often requires interaction with conservationists, researchers, scholars, scientists, writers or other artists. Artistic inspiration is from both painting and photography. This includes painters such Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan van Goyen, and others as well as photographic works capturing changing worlds. As a visual artist, this is an exciting collaborative opportunity to share this work in the US and world-wide but feel it is crucially urgent to complete before the land metamorphoses further. 

Artist’s Bio

Steve Giovinco is a New York-based photographer. Tracing environmental change, his work focuses on eerie long exposure night landscape images. Public and private collections including his photographs are the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the California Museum of Photography. Exhibitions of his work include the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati; Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia; Winnipeg Art Gallery; White Columns; Sadler’s Wells, London; Gyeongnam Art Museum, Korea. He’s a Fulbright Fellow Alternate, attended artist residencies at Yaddo, and received numerous grants. He was commissioned by one of the first blockchain art platforms, Monegraph, a photo was included in Summertime, published by Chronicle Books, and he has made artists’ books. Giovinco earned an MFA from Yale University.

Photographs