About The Shadow Is All One
If the photographic world can be accused of anything it can be accused of being too rational. Or at least as it attempts to explain itself to itself and to the wider world, it becomes over rationalised. The greater truth lying behind such ’academicisation’ is that visual art can never be fully explained through language alone, it is a different way of thinking, it is in fact seeing.
Seeing carries within it a direct path to our subconscious minds which is why we find it so difficult to explain it in the more rational construction of language.
The Shadow is all One strips back our rational approach by both portraying the night, a time of great mystery, unease and even fear. And through the use of cubist construction questions our assumptions about the land that surrounds us and how photography has traditionally portrayed it. Indeed the first inspiration from the series came from studying a Paul Klee painting of North Africa that hangs above my desk. I wondered how the apparent deconstruction of the cubist approach could combine to create something greater than the technique used.
Ideas of process in photography are often confined to the strictly physical, the tools and techniques used to make the image. Yet of course, the artistic process is far greater than the tools used to make photographs, it can result from the thought processes that lie behind the image and combine with technique and tools to form a greater whole.
If we accept that such processes are important then it questions the assumption of the additive nature of either analogue or digital photography. It opens our world to many more possibilities by undermining simplistic thinking.
These images are an act of imagination, something I value in photography, being made during daylight, and through the process of additional layers they become progressively darker. It becomes night because of the process. It is transformed as an act of human intervention not merely the physical properties inherent in the process itself.