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Hafkenscheid explores metaphoric fact and fiction in photography. By literally blurring the visual... he creates a document that moves back and forth between reality and illusion. Although the works represent and are true actual places, the way in which Hafkenscheid executes them makes these landscapes look like model versions of each location.
This idea occurred to him on a summer trip to British Columbia a few years ago. How bizarre and almost fake the landscape looked. Train tracks were set in an artificial plain of faux cotton trees, plastic buildings, and cardboard mountains, with suggested men and women walking, shopping, etc. When looking at a normal distance, he almost felt like God, high above this false world and felt in control of it as well. If he looked close enough though, this world would shift back to look almost real again. This back and forth is a great agenda of the work. Hafkenscheid achieves this by utilizing a shallow depth of field to make sections of the image soft and others in focus. The colors are then tweaked to look like vintage postcards, recalling a certain American dream, an idealized view of an immediate future typical of the 1950's.
Toni Hafkenscheid has a MFA from the Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. He recently was named one of the top 100 photographers to collect from a survey called Photography Now. He has exhibited his works at Dazibao in Montréal, Napier University in Edinburg, La Chambre Blanche in Québec, Desmet in Amsterdam, Capi Lux in Amsterdam, the Centre for Exploratory and Perceptual Art in Buffalo, the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo, the E3 Gallery in New York, the Power Plant in Toronto and the Floating Gallery in Winnipeg.
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