Between Hope and Despair:
Natasha Fijn

Between Hope and Despair forms a juxtaposition between two photographic series, each documenting a place immediately after a time of crisis. Fijn contrasts her observations of temperate Australian forest recovering from the devastating 2020 bushfires with her grandfather’s, Jan Reinder Fijn, record of the American liberation of Nazi-occupied Maastricht in 1945.

​Natasha and Jan have both employed the art of critical, participant observation in the documentation of their respective landscapes. The two locations are separated by a time span of seventy-five years, but are connected by an intergenerational sense of urgency, through an acute attention to their surrounding environments.