Dutch landscape photographer zooms in on Kansas

An unusual aerial perspective is the common thread in much of Dutch landscape photographer Gerco de Ruijter’s work. He’s not looking for the view from 35,000 feet. He prefers a bird’s-eye look of several dozen feet – that’s when the landscape can become as abstract as it is at a micro level.

“By zooming out, you get the same kind of abstraction,” he said.

De Ruijter is currently in Kansas as the 2015 Ulrich Underground artist in residence at Wichita State University. He is conducting a workshop with students and has presented two lectures, one for the general public and one for a group of senior citizens. De Ruijter is officially in residence until early August, but his work will be exhibited at the Ulrich Museum of Art through Sept. 13. Additionally, the university will acquire at least one piece created by de Ruijter during the residency.

On one of his first photography outings locally, de Ruijter went to the old Wichita Greyhound Park, where he was intrigued by the cracks in the parking lot – evidence of both the cultural impact on the land and nature sprouting through.

As he often does, de Ruijter sent up a kite with his camera and captured shots with a timer. He wasn’t entirely prepared for the Kansas climate.

“The wind here is pretty unpredictable, I’ve found,” de Ruijter said.

In recent years, de Ruijter also has experimented quite a bit with images collected from Google Earth, and he has been captivated by what he sees when he zooms in on and manipulates the crop circles that form when farmers use center-point irrigation. He appreciates the contrast with the traditional rectangular division of fields.

“I’m very much into a grid and framing things,” he said.

In Kansas, de Ruijter is working on capturing a 360-degree panorama of a field on a center pivot arm.

He also is exploring what he calls “grid corrections” – places where Kansas counties’ borders don’t quite match up.

“The roundness of the Earth doesn’t always fit into a square grid,” he said.

Additionally, de Ruijter has created several stop-motion videos using the thousands of images he has distilled from Google Earth.

One, called “Playground,” is on exhibit at the Ulrich. The video flips through aerial perspectives of hundreds of American football fields at a dizzying pace.

Blink, and you’ll miss the Kansas State University and University of Kansas football fields. But it’s not just the snazzy, logo-filled artificial-turf college fields that are featured – different levels of upkeep and fields representing different levels of play flash across the screen.

De Ruijter first planned to utilize soccer fields for the project, but the varying sizes used around the world stymied him. He was happy to discover that American football fields were all one standard size for the visual effect. And de Ruijter hopes to walk an actual perimeter of a football field during his stay in Kansas.

De Ruijter also has extensively documented open landscapes of the American Southwest, the Netherlands and Iceland.

He has no intention of using drones to capture his aerial images, although he is asked the question frequently. Drones, he said, are too light to hold up the camera he prefers to use, the batteries run out quickly, and they are noisy.

“I like to be in nature with a quiet kite,” de Ruijter said.

This story was originally published July 23, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Dutch landscape photographer zooms in on Kansas."