Anice Hoachlander has been working as an architectural photographer for the past thirty years, or as she puts it, “all I have ever done in my life has been a photographer.” Anice works as both a commercial photographer of architecture and a fine art photographer, though her interest in fine art is recently revived after taking a backseat to focus on her commissions. Despite her wealth of experience and background as an architectural photographer, she states that she still “felt like an emerging artist” as she began to explore her fine art more. This feeling is exactly what drew Anice to Touchstone: to her, the community has been a guiding force. As she seeks to apply her foundations and line of thinking to this new pursuit, she found that the collective of artists at Touchstone have helped her to articulate that transition.
Even as a commercial photographer, Anice found that it was important to her to photograph buildings in a dynamic, living way. This idea lent itself very well to her fine art portfolios, the titles of which being “Mushroom Symphonics”, “Geometric Expressionism” (inspired by the Precisionist Movement), “The Structural Landscape” (the subject being Live Oak trees), and “Elemental Details” (depicting miniature natural details in sharp view). These portfolios are all united by her inspiration she takes from the repetition, order, and structure of architecture and applying that concept to organic materials. She views these elements of nature as being building material in their own way, their patterns forming solid, 3-D shapes. Anice is particularly interested in the way light brings fresh energy and life to these structures. In fact, she states that “everywhere I see structure, and I see its light.” This is particularly evident in her “Mushroom Symphonics” collection - the ripples of the mushrooms, enlarged in great detail yet retaining excellent sharpness is brought to life by light falling into the crevasses of the organic material and bouncing off of the smooth walls with a sense of lyricism.
In fact, her ability to retain eloquent articulation of these organic details of the structures in such a micro-view is remarkable. Anice accomplishes this by taking multiple images, racking the focus differently on separate parts of the subject, and then stacking them together to form a sharply articulated photo. While the final product is as detailed as the view one would see with their eye, the process produces a sort of “softness” in the lines that introduce an element of abstraction. The harsh lines of the structural patterns are diffused out by the softness of the light that Anice brights out through this process.
One of Anice’s goals is ensuring that her portfolios all “look like they’ve come from the same photographer,” despite having greatly varied subject matters. This goal has certainly been achieved: her four fine art portfolios are unified by attention to bringing a source of dynamism to structure. Anice believes that “everything is patterns and repetition.” In viewing Anice’s work, this vision of structure quite clearly comes across. Her photography creates a worldview that is driven by the rhythm of these organic melodies flowing from the world around us.
See Anice’s work in New Artists Spotlight exhibition and in ongoing Touchstone group shows.