Rolf Kraehenbuehl ARPS is a Swiss resident, but has been resident in the UK since 2005.
He was RPS North Wales Chapter Organiser from 2018-2023. He is currently studying for the RPS support MA Photography at Falmouth University.
Rolf is a keen street photographer making work in large British and European cities, and post-pandemic he now mainly works in Wales where he lives. His photographic interests increasingly focus on the cultural landscape and humankind’s place-making within this environment, with the explicit inclusion of the vernacular as part of our everyday surroundings, which are a read-out of social life and cultural values.
His current work centres on the built coastline and seaside promenades as places of leisure and recreation, and their artificial surfaces which change the land and democratise access. In an ongoing project, he is aiming to imprint the qualities and topographies of promenade and seawall surfaces onto the photographs. Working with medium format film he brings the negatives through grattage in direct contact with the surfaces photographed, thereby leaving traces and scars on the film as a different form of indexicality. Inspired by ideas of automatism by Paul Klee and the Surrealists, allowing the subconscious to emerge as a creative force, his movements with the negatives on the built surfaces are a reaction to the forms and shapes encountered, reflecting his state of mind while making work, and the ambiguity of his experience and space-place relationship in these locations.
