Image via Complex Original
Canadian artist Erika Altosaar travels the world with her camera and sketchbook. From India to Colombia and across her home country, her practice explores what it means to be a woman, and her work, both images and studies, captures gender dynamics all over the globe.
While she approaches her subjects through the lens of feminism, Altosaar's images also have a salient beauty that extends beyond her research and personal interests. Her self-portrait (above) was taken in the salt flats of Bolivia, and she calls the surreal landscape "an appropriate introduction to the weirdest place I’ve been."
We spoke to the artist about flying from country to country to take her breathtaking photos of landscapes and the curious people that inhabit them. Check out our Portfolio Review: Erika Altosaar Shares Stunning Photos of Unforgettable Trips Across the World.
“I finally traveled across my own country this year, and entering the Valley of the Ten Peaks for the first time was one of those hilariously stereotypical moments where you walk into a Canadian postcard. I expected it to feel like a cliché, but I’m pretty sure I jumped out of my seat and dropped my jaw every time we took a turn on the road.”
“Two years ago I found myself in Kerala, after having spent a month in the north of India. I initially found myself in the country because I was drawn to the study of the recently dismantled caste system, but I was able to do very little productive research in the northern provinces because of stricter religious laws. Kerala’s social attitude allowed me the leisure of traveling as a woman, independently, and with that liberty I was able to spend days canoeing in its backwaters, weaving through the channels and climbing over suspended bridges built to adjoin communities separated by water. I was welcomed into schools and into homes, and for the first time had an opportunity to discuss social and gender issues with locals.”
“It’s hard to beat the views of a hike in the Rockies. The rhythm is soothing. You’re in deep woods until you reach a big break in the horizon. Peyto Lake probably has the most dramatic view. You reach your first break on the hike and, on one end, you come face-to-face with a glacier. On the other end, you see a wolf-shaped lake that is a beautifully surreal milky, icy blue.”
“The wax palm valley in Colombia’s coffee triangle is my favorite tropical region in the country. You climb through waterfalls, over boulders, across suspended bridges, and get high enough in altitude to sit in clouds before closing in on the valley itself. It’s a really unusual landscape where proportions don’t really make sense, and it gives you the impression that you are very small.”
“When I was in Myanmar, I left Yangon for Bagan overnight. I approached this young girl because she was traveling with this full chicken and all of its parts, and I thought it was amazing. When I showed her the photo I’d taken of her, she laughed and offered me something to eat.”
“It’s no surprise that the Andes are full of very elaborate agricultural systems. These salt flats built into a mountain weren’t producing salt yet, so rather than looking like salt beds, they looked like tanneries layered into the mountain.”
“My friend and I had set up camp for the night on Lower Kananaskis Lake because the snow was too much to continue hiking. It was wild, and we couldn’t see anything through the snow until the clouds broke and everything stilled. All of a sudden we had this perfect reflection of fresh snow on the mountains in Kananaskis County.”
“Colombia is a remarkably welcoming and social country. It may have helped that I passed as a local, but whenever an effort was made to communicate, I immediately had a captive audience.”
“The Atacama Desert is, in one word, surreal. The altitude’s effect on your oxygen intake alone makes it feel like you’ve dramatically experienced the landscape and imagined it all at the same time. The colored lagoons, flamingos, and alpacas everywhere honestly made me feel like I was Alice in Wonderland.”
“As in most Asian countries, men in Myanmar chew betel. This man was great. He had ice blue eyes and teeth stained red from the Betel, and he was the only man working in a bamboo yard with a small group of women, where they weave the plant to use as a building material for houses. We spoke to each other at length and didn’t have a single word in common, but we both seemed really happy to meet one another.”
“I’m still trying to get over the relationship I built with the Canadian Rockies when I was there. I’m obsessed with this straight horizon line from Jasper to Banff on Highway 93, where, depending on the time of year, all you can see are mountains striped with snow and ice blue lakes in the region.”
“One of my favorite things to experience while traveling is language. I’ll never forget this moment, where the sun rose over the Himalayas, after we had been waiting in the very early morning in the cold West Bengal Mountains surrounded by Tibetan women selling hot coffee. They weren’t able to pronounce the letter ‘F,’ so they were yelling, ‘Hot copy!’ repeatedly over the crowd. It felt like we were in a different place in a different time. They knew their audience, though, because the volume was reduced to zero the second the sun hit its first peak.”
“This was my last road in the Rockies before I drove into British Columbia with some friends that I’d literally bumped into on a trail (there is some truth to how ‘small’ Canada is). Leaving the Rockies feels like you’re leaving the country. It was a very strange feeling, but I remember my stomach sinking because Canada was one of the best countries I’d traveled to, and I didn’t want to leave.”
