Hybrids: The seeds of photographic possibility
Experimentation, innovation and creativity are the stimulus for all the work that I make. Making visible the previously unseen, like turning over a stone to look at the other side, which was there all along but was unnoticed.
The work in this exhibition is a combination of technology and ex-nology, using current processes combined with very simple past methods, to have the best of both worlds, by using the most manual way, to achieve the capture of the visual material and then using digital for what it is best at – processing and output.
Because the photographic medium is also a commercial product sold to the general public, unlike other creative mediums, it has that element of the seductiveness of the new, just as in fashion, where it’s practitioners are continually tempted by the marketing of new things.
But as with all things, as you move in a new direction you can lose some of the choices that were available to you before. Most particularly in the case of current technology, it is the ability to make an individual effect on images.
I find with every new development there is a relinquishing of controls that were available to the photographer previously and while digital technology is great for a lot of things, it is also a fact that a great deal has been given up in the process of gaining the ease of use it provides.
Photoshop can layer images but it does not merge them in the way that in camera exposures on film does. This is one example of the loss of personal control. After things are lost as a creative possibility, it is quite difficult to retrieve them again because the profit driven side of the medium makes it so.
Having been involved with photography for a long time I have noticed that photographers come to the medium for their own personal reasons, which often have less to do with the love of the medium and more to do with a love of what the medium can do to suit their own needs.
There are also those photographers who also exhibit a love of the medium itself. The ones who produce images of such power or imagination that it can leave a viewer breathless or with the sense of actual immersion or participation and can produce an emotional response in the viewer.
I have a love of all forms of imagery and the many different means of it’s making. Its primary elements fascinate me- how light works and how different capture methods can be used in creative ways to produce something visually new.
The photographic process is very broad and possesses many capabilities to effect change on an image, through amalgamation, metamorphosis and evolution, which are seemingly lesser known aspects of the medium but ones that I have always found fascinating and through which I have found new paths which can lead the viewer to perceive the world in a new light.
The title Hybrids refers to the process of image making I have been engaged in for most of my photographic career, pushing and pulling at the edges of the medium.
There is no shortage of people working with traditional photographic methods, producing excellent but often all to familiar results but there are far fewer who are prepared to spend their time testing the outer limits of the medium (which I have yet to find).
It is the unexpected surprises that occur with this working method that keeps me interested in the medium 35 years on, as it is clear there are still things to be revealed by a process that has had such a good workout by so many talented photographers over the past 175 years.
I have always started by working within a particular set of parameters, decided in part by the selected means of image capture, which varies from one body of work to the next and the subject matter and by developing a repeatable system of capture, processing or manipulation, which is at first unpredictable and surprising but through testing and experience becomes controllable.
Every method I have worked with has in turn lead me to another set of experimental conditions that can then be explored, forming an unfolding series of works that are interrelated but that also move into new territory with each learning experience.
My love of colour and nature is the focus of the content of these images and like a gardener, breeding or grafting plants to create new hybrids, my photographs also bring together natural elements in similar unexpected convergences.
The images in this exhibition were made at three of Sydney’s Botanic Gardens; Royal Sydney, Mount Annan and Mount Tomah, using a cheap, low tech, plastic camera and colour film.
Strangely, the simpler the technology involved in a piece of equipment, the greater the chance you have to do something unexpected with it, as it isn’t limited by it’s own design.
The camera used to make these images is like the very earliest of cameras, it is not mechanized in any way, its film advance is variable, exposure is by intuition, there is no capacity to adjust anything on it other than focus, which has three choices: close, middle distance or far away. It leaks light due to its cheap construction, which in turn effects the colours of the images, which are made by the action of coloured light on the film.
Nothing it produces is predictable and that is the very quality I like about it.
But after using it for a while, it became controllable, to a point.
There hasn't been one roll of film that came back from processing where it didn't pleasantly surprise me. Contemporary technology while clean, predictable and mechanized is also cold, because of its predictability, which of course has its place but isn’t much fun, as there are no pleasant surprises.
This method of working produces a sprit of adventure in me, which keeps me going.
In making this work, many exposures (up to 30 in some cases) were layered over the top of each other, splicing slivers of time to produce images based in photographic reality but which dissolve into dreamlike panoramic environments of lush colour and texture.
Film, exposed in this way becomes one single image, which was then divided, scanned and digitally reconstructed (due to the limitations of scanners) and resolved into images which defy the documentary aspects of photography and move instead towards impressionistic, painterly outcomes, through the method of their making.
The images themselves have not been altered in Photoshop beyond the rejoining of the multiple scans, colour correction and cleaning, which was necessary due to the method used.
The subject matter, that of unusual and rare plants found in the Botanic gardens, help to enhance this otherworldly effect.
Nature produces fantastic variations based on principals of genetic building blocks and this is the thought I had gone into this work with. Just as small variations can occur in nature, leading to greater evolutionary change, this occurs in my images on a micro scale.
The resulting images to me are like a visual immersion in the gardens which produce an experiential sense of moving through the environment with peripheral vision of things, just as you would see when viewing a scene without a camera.
Some things are sharply in focus while others are almost subliminal when viewing the world. The illusion presented by the optics of photography is that the world is sharp and precise all over but in truth vision does not actually work that way.
These images to me have the feel of real vision, where you only clearly see the thing you are looking at and only get a sense of that which is out of the area the eye is focused on. They also contain multiple angles of view, which create a sense of the eye scanning the environment.
The photographer Dorothea Lange was quoted as saying
“the camera teaches people how to see without a camera”.
These images are in a sense a model of what drew my attention when the images were made and are a doorway for the viewer into my experience and perception of the world.