Bio: Toni Hafkenscheid is a Toronto based photographer who was born in 1959 in Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He has exhibited in galleries throughout Canada, the U.S. and Europe, including the Recontres Internationales de la Photographie in France, Gallery 44 in Canada and the Canadian Embassy in Japan. His work is featured in the collections of the Canadian Museum for Contemporary, Art Gallery of Ontatrio, the Canada Council Art Bank, Kodak Netherlands and Kodak France.

Statement: Because photography so closely resembles reality, I have always been interested in what constitutes fact and fiction in a photograph. On a summer trip to British Columbia a few years ago it struck me, how bizarre and almost fake the landscape looked. It reminded me of the model train set I used to play with when I was a kid. When looking at this fake landscape at a normal distance, you almost felt like God, high above this artificial world and in total control of it as well. If you looked close enough though this world would start to look almost real again. In this series of photographs I am trying to play with this illusion of real and fake in the landscape by utilizing shallow depth of field to make some parts of the image soft and others in focus.


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