essential
NATURE

Photography is an old friend that I hadn’t spent time with for many years. Back in art school days, I fell in love with black-and-white, through the back-to-front viewfinder of my twin-lens mechanical camera, and the alchemy of the darkroom. Then, when I started travelling, and no longer had my darkroom, I turned to painting, embracing my other love—colour.

So with my return to photography, in the (to me) new domain of digital, I played for a bit and then went back to where I had left off. It seemed the right way to capture the essential NATURE of what I was exploring. Black and white. Square. With the additional layers of what painting has taught me over the years in-between.

This series is about exploring processes of transformation through photographing nature.

Taking photographs of objects in nature as they are, then without fiddling with the basic structure of the image or the composition, use simple tools to transform the image to show its essential NATURE.

Exposure. Brightness. Contrast. Black-and-white. Crop to focus on something specific. And add my written thoughts about the image and process, because my creative expression is always both images and words.

My images will then be transformed from simply capturing nature as it appears, to an artwork, or an interpretation of what the essence of the object reveals to me. This is also to some extent an analogy or exploration of the processes we use in our own lives to transform our ordinary selves into something “better”. Closer to an ideal, or reinvent ourselves in new ways.