A new world has been created. The Surrealist poet Paul Eluard wrote that, “There is another world, but it is in this one.” That’s one of the most compelling functions of photography; to discover the marvellous in the unexamined and to look at something that meant nothing at all, and invite us to give it meaning.
Each of these six silver gelatin images comes from a selection of my interests: the settling and unsettling of the prairies; the relationship of photography and painting; the passage of time on the small plot of land that I own; the materiality of images in a digital world; and the fact that all photographs are, by nature, an abstraction of our physical reality based on a machine perspective.
None of these interests are resolved into “projects” proper, mostly because I’m suspicious of work that is subsumed under a concept that prompts its production. More often than not, the result is simply illustrational (at least it is for me), with images then yoked to words that blunt the many exciting energies of the silver gelatin print itself.
For me, the late German photographer Michael Schmidt put it most succinctly: “….my pictures are autonomous; they don’t have any direct relation to what is happening out there, but only show you the idea of what photography is. That is to say, there is no direct comparison with the outside world; a new world has been created instead. There still is a reference within the images themselves: photography thrives on the fact that it has once had a counterpart.”
