Pastoral is a genre that poeticizes simple, peaceful rural life. In fine art, for example, you may recall Poussin’s works with their idealized landscapes inhabited by happy shepherds.
As his inspirations, Alexander Gronsky names several photographers who have worked in a way that is similar to his, that is redefining the aesthetic. Particularly notable among them is Stephen Shore, a pioneer in use of color photography as artistic medium. The chaotic nature of Shore’s pictures forces one to search for meanings outside of the usual conventions and in the end changes the viewer’s perceptions altogether. Regarding the younger generation of photographers, Alexander Gronsky has been compared to Nadav Kander (Israel) and Peter Bialobrezki (Germany). These photographers also use landscape to examine the ways that the “human” and the “natural” mutually pervade and influence one another. And yet Alexander goes further in his search, declaring that “his photographs are about the person looking at them.” In this statement he suggests that viewers renonce all that they know and take the path of dialogue, that they reject the usual procedure for interpreting a work of art; a new standpoint is the first thing that viewers need to obtain in order to gain an understanding of themselves and the world around them.