"The
real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in
having new eyes."
Marcel Proust
 |
About the photographyI have been photographing water in the local landscape of Bedford since 1983. This is not a grand or exotic landscape, but in these close-up photographs of water, shadows and reflections, another world is revealed. Although the images have not been manipulated by the photographer – with filters, digital imaging or in the darkroom – they give an impression of a distorted reality. While they have an appearance of alien landscapes, they are records of a real place. The photographs are the result of intense looking, concentrating on isolated elements of a landscape.
A 300mm zoom lens is currently used, with the image made directly in the camera at the ‘looking’ stage instead of later in the darkroom. The photographic print can be made from the entire transparency without any cropping of the image edges.
The wide-angle lens is a conventional means of photographing landscape. My photographs represent the equivalent of viewing a landscape through a microscope. This ability to get close to the surface of the water has resulted in pictures with a highly abstract appearance, sometimes with a painterly texture and pattern.
In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin uses the analogy of the different working methods of a surgeon and a magician to compare the work of a painter with a cameraman - the magician cures a sick person by the laying on of hands while the surgeon cuts into their body. "Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web." In a sense, I am using a zoom lens to penetrate the web of reality.
There is a statement by the British artist Paul Nash about his own photographs, which I think relates to my own work: "The landscapes I have in mind belong to the world that lies visibly about us. They are unseen merely because they are not perceived".
The pictures are made on transparency film, with selected photographs printed onto Cibachrome (Ilfachrome) paper. Exhibition prints are usually printed on 8 x 12 inch paper, although some earlier work was made with a medium format camera ( 6 x 9 cm) and printed onto 24 x 20 inch paper.While still photographing the landscape and producing prints, I am also exploring the use of digital imaging and image maps as a means of producing 'close-ups' of web-based photographs. The most recent work has taken the form of backlit digital images displayed on light boxes.