In The Beginning…

Making photographs of the landscape reveals what history and time have done to the landscape. There is clear evidence of millions of years of dramatic geological upheavals. Also clear are the scars of human intervention. It’s a narrative that’s constantly rewritten and changing.

These panoramas are made from multiple images, each one understandable in its own right, that depict a reality observed just before the click of the shutter. Once merged into a single large image they become a true likeness, a photograph with authentic documentary value recording what time, history and people have done to the land, sea and sky. In imagining a post-apocalyptic landscape a sense of alienation and ‘other world’ combine to encourage a feeling of the austere and the sublime simultaneously.

Process

The individual frames for the panoramas were shot on a full-frame Nikon Z7 camera using a 50mm lens. A calibrated tripod head was used alongside established techniques for making multi-row panoramas. The high-resolution frames were merged in Photoshop and then adjusted as if in the darkroom

The work in this exhibition was started in the winter of 2019/20 and most of the post-production completed during the height of the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020. The extended lockdowns gave time to add to the images on show in early spring 2021.

All the images were printed by Alexandra Drawbridge at Solaris in St. Leonards and framed by Patrick Jones at Project 78, also in St. Leonards.