Deeply committed to a romanticist pursuit of expressive and sublime scenery, Becker has patiently developed his practice and progressed beyond the linearity of traditional landscape photography to find a unique style that formally reflects his own perceptions which come to be represented by the demure splendor of Iceland's natural beauty.

Originally a practitioner of painting, Becker switched to photography but maintained the tactile materialist quality of painting as he developed in the new medium. As if the antithesis to his countryman and fellow artist Gerhard Richter, Becker takes his photographic compositions and turns them into something that hybridizes the distant universality of photography with the personal materiality of painting. By photographing at night, with the flat, diffuse Nordic light diminishing shadows and elongating the intensity of his palate, Becker doesn't photograph scenery, he builds compositions, using his eye - and his patience - to develop a work of melancholic beauty.

When considering Becker's practice, the powerfful iconography of the nineteenth century painter, venturing out into the sublime of an open expanse, seems fittingly apropos. With his large format 8x10 camera in place of an easel, Becker lets the scene approach him, patiently waiting for the right imagery - and conditions - to reveal themselves. To that end, Becker sometimes waits for days before taking a single image. In fact, in four years, having covered over 11,000 miles of Icelandic terrain, Becker has only taken about a hundred color photographs, a testament to his enduring artistic commitment. Though visually diverse, Becker's work all share the contemplative characteristic of their creator. Many of his works feature unpopulated expanses of intrepid natural beauty: a series of waterfalls cascading over precipices, an endless ocean expanse, while others show the point at which land and civilization intersect: a canal dug into volcanic stone, boats resting atop the still waters of a small town harbor. The grey of a gravel construction site becomes the dispersed background upon which yellow and red construction machines come to expand beyond the common place and exist as ardent figurines. In another composition, a concrete dam and charcoal-like canyon walls act in a similar manner, hyperbolizing the gray and textural to such a degree that the viewer initially perceives the image as black and white until the subtle brilliance of a red rescue ring and a line of blue tubing come to infuse the image with a profoundly simple yet diverse experiential quality.

Becker has exhibited widely in Europe and his book Under the Nordic Light was short-listed for the renowned 2006 Rencontres D'Arles Book Award. He has a forthcoming book of images from Greenland scheduled to be published by Steidl and he will be exhibiting his Icelandic work at the Museum of Photography in Reykjavik in 2007.

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