Photographer Toni Hafkenscheid says he was “chasing trains” for three weeks before he found just the right spot overlooking an S curve for Train Snaking Through Mountains. Then he waited several hours for a train to appear, knowing that Canadian Pacific’s trademark red would contrast with the surrounding trees and draw the eye in. The resulting image, with its toylike colors and highly restricted area of focus, resembles the miniature scenes in catalogs designed to entice model train enthusiasts.
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People often mistake Hafkenscheid’s lushly beautiful land- and cityscapes for photographs of models, and “HO,” the title of his show of eight images at Aron Packer, refers to a model train track gauge. A native of Rotterdam (“a very clean and well-ordered city”) now living in Toronto, Hafkenscheid says he wants to “play with the fake and real” in a medium usually thought to represent reality, often simply waiting for the right false-looking effect to occur. For River Road–Vancouver, B.C., taken from a high suspension bridge, he watched the intersection of a road and rail line for two hours, until three trucks showed up at once, each in a different primary color. Two of them, some trees, and an adjacent gas station are the only objects in focus in this postcardlike scene. Roller Coaster–Santa Monica, CA, taken while Hafkensheid was driving his kids to Disneyland, shows a fragile-looking roller coaster against a blue sky; the American flag visible through it is the image’s only sharp component. This time he waited for the flag to be horizontal so the stars and stripes would be clear. “Canadians and Americans fly their flags quite often compared to Holland, and the flags tend to be big–they look almost fake,” he says.
Hafkenscheid and his wife often spend summers in her hometown of Hope, British Columbia, which is in the middle of the Rockies, surrounded by three mountains. The place has always looked incredibly surreal, even fake, to him: “Through the years the idea grew that I really should do something with this incredible landscape.” Aiming for more control over focus than the Diana gave him, he bought a Hasselblad whose lens can be tilted with respect to the film to select a single area that’s sharp. He knew exactly what he wanted–to re-create the look of model train sets in photographs–but says his first images were a “total disaster.” Eventually he developed the methods he still uses, among them shooting from overhead, which makes him “feel like God, with power over the world.”
When: Through May 28
