two set of photographs which were part of a joint exhibition with Paul Medley, at Magdalen Road Studios Gallery Oxford in April 2024. For further details, and if you are interested in buying prints, see below, and contact me.
PIGS AT EWELME
HOO PENINSULA
If there is something which links my two sets of photographs, the pigs of Ewelme and the Hoo Peninsula landscapes, it would be the anthropo(s)cenic aspect. It is what draws me to want to put traces down. The confined, powerless, ephemeral pigs are suspended between mud and sky. The boat wrecks are prey to tides and silt.
An initial sensation seems to be the motive for photographic action. An action which by its nature comes after, inevitably later, frustratingly so. That relationship between the immediate memory of the sensation, and the multiple actions which take place around it, is what constructs the set of flat traces which a photograph is.
A convoluted way of talking about snapping…
The idea of capture, with its implied timelessness, often tagged onto photographic activity, doesn’t figure much in my own experience of the process.
Pigs
When it comes to encountering the pigs of Ewelme, their presence, where they live, their clumping together in such a definite way, how they relate (or not) to visitors, all this creates relationships where there is an entanglement of feeling, idea, and raw visual sensation.
They are creatures one can easily project onto: what we do to them, the fear that we might be like them, be them even ( and the relief that we are not.)
HOO PENINSULA
Technical details:
Black and white:
Taken on film (Ilford HP5), printed digitally.
Mamiya C330S TLR square format (120) 80mm lens
Nikon F80 35 mm with AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4 lens
Colour:
All digital
Fuji X100F
Nikon D600 with AF-S NIKKOR 24-120mm f/4 lens
Nikon D610 with 8mm f/2.8 Fisheye-Nikkor AI
Fims processed and scanned by Silverpan Bristol
Pigment digital printing: MP printing http://mpfineartprinting.co.uk/
C-type prints: Metroprint London
With thanks to Duncan Gammon (Bristol) and Daniel Mark Taylor (Culham)
Prices:
Hoo peninsula
Small square format on Awagami paper: £90 (framed: £175)
Large square format on Awagami paper: £95 unframed
C-type print mounted on board (gas blossoms): £150
Pigs at Ewelme
£90.00 (framed: £175)
panoramic: £100 unframed
C-type print mounted on board £150
Bruno Guastalla 