Martina Hoogland Ivanow
Far too close
- PhotographerMartina Hoogland Ivanow
FELIX ODELL Melancholic, analog - an extraordinary artist with a language entirely her own. Through evocative light, shadow, and deliberate ambiguity, she creates images that feel cinematic, ritualistic, and quietly profound. I had the privilege of assisting her many years ago. What I admire most is her way of seeing - shaping light and composition with intention, then conjuring magic in the analog print.
Far Too Close
Far Too Close is a meditative photographic series that investigates the paradox of distance—how one can be intimately close yet profoundly remote. Martina Hoogland Ivanow weaves together family portraits and domestic interiors with landscapes from some of the most remote and historically charged places on Earth, creating a poetic and unsettling dialogue between familiarity and estrangement.
Developed over seven years, the project brought her to Siberia, Sakhalin Island, Tierra del Fuego and The Kola Peninsula. These landscapes, marked by layered histories and geopolitical tensions, are set against deeply personal imagery to reveal photography’s dual capacity: to preserve what is familiar while also summoning the uncanny.
Critics have described the work as nostalgic, painterly, and poetic, distinguished by a dark, deliberate aesthetic. Often drained of color, the photographs heighten structure, mood, and emotional resonance. Hoogland Ivanow herself defines Far Too Close as “a visual meditation on distance, both physical and emotional” - a sequence of brief yet haunting narratives, each contained within a single frame.
