Agata Kontra

Flower portraits

This is a collection of pictures taken in the year 2023 in Botanical Garden in Ghent.

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New Sea Land

When the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman first saw New Zealand, he decided to name it so because it reminded him of the region in his homeland called Zeeland (which translates to “Sealand”).

My First Impressions were a bit like Abel’s Tasman – I took pictures of things that I compared with the ones back home, things that surprised me or just brought up special feelings.

The Second Impressions were probably the most difficult ones – it’s the time I’ve got comfortable in the place and started seeing things that disturbed the landscape, it was also the time when I got an opinion about what I saw.

The Third Impressions happened when the decision of leaving came – it was the time when I desperately tried to document what I might never see again or what might not exists for much longer.

Although this method of organisation looks strictly connected to the whole period of time, it’s usually not. New Zealand is a big and diverse country. In some places I’ve spent weeks or months so I’ve got the third impression, there were as well several places that I briefly visited, like most of tourists, and been able to get only the first impression.

This is collection of scanned pictures taken between January 2019 and January 2020 with my father’s Zenith 19 analog camera in various places of New Zealand.