In July last year, I undertook a journey from Broome to Alice Springs, photographing the Australian landscape. Rather than taking conventional landscape photographs, I was determined to take a more creative approach. I wanted to use colour, texture, movement and reflection to create photographs that distilled the essence of the landscape. I took photographs at low shutter speeds to blur moving parts of the image and add a sense of time to the photograph. I experimented with the use of water to enhance reflections on the surfaces of rocks, literally painting the scene with water and observing and photographing its effects. I took close up images of details within the landscape. This exhibition contains a selection of the resulting photographs.
All the photographs in the exhibition were taken using traditional film, rather than a digital camera and have had minimal enhancement during processing. I rejected digital imagery for this journey as I wanted to create images that exist in an analogue form that can be viewed and held in your hands, rather than a series of bytes on a computer with no point of reference. That's not to say I didn't use a digital camera to help produce some of the photographs. I used one to help me plan compositions, work out exposures and experiment with different shutter speeds to produce the effect I wanted. Using film makes me slow down, allowing me to better appreciate the surroundings, instead of rapidly taking a series of photographs without thought to their content.
Many of these photographs may be challenging and even confronting to look at. We have the tendency to expect a photograph to have a definable subject, yet many of these photographs are abstract with an ill-defined content. My challenge to you when viewing these photographs is to pause your search for the subject and appreciate the beauty of the actual image before you.
The photographs are printed by Brilliant Prints on archival canvas using pigmented inks to produce an image that is ready to hang and which will last a lifetime. They are available to purchase at the Council Offices for $595 (sizing is shown in the slideshow above). Smaller mounted photographs of the pictures in the exhibition are also available for $95.
