A recent collection of Van Dyke Brown photographs I have made, with the intention of emphasizing the natural patterns and textures found when one looks exceptionally close at various fragments of earth.
From petrified fossils of trilobites, to the skeletal remains of coral, to the shattered cavern of a halved geode, I am often romanticized by unique manifestations of the rock and decaying matter that compose of our earth's crust.
Remnants of the Past
Whole lives are spent on the study of such ancient remnants of lifeforms. The evidence is found suspended in the many layers of soil, archeologists try to compose whole worlds that have existed before us by studying what they find. Yet in simple observation, any person can discover whole other-worldly planes when using technologies like macro lenses of cameras. The camera invites a new perspective onto these natural relics, perspectives that exists within millimeters and yet can appear to be the surface of some oddly terra-formed planet.
Fossil 1, (Trilobite), 2016. Van Dyke Brown print 10"x12".
Fossil 2, (Golden Section), 2016. Vandyke Brown print 10"x10".
Microcosms
The characteristics of the object at such close quarters have always excited me. The lens of a camera invites this new quasi-reality where everything can be seen new again; up close and personal with the object's composition, the very matter that holds that object together, becomes the focus. I can only share in the thrill with what I would imagine scientist and archaeologists get when they too first behold such new sights.
There have been many photographers who have explored the microscopic worlds with their cameras, and even today as electron microscopes push the boundaries of imagery, the desire and curiosity of looking extremely close at things is a commonly shared human trait.
Macro-cosm 1, (Coral), 2016. Vandyke Brown print 10"x10".
Macro-cosm 2, (Geode crystal), 2016. Vandyke Brown print 10"x10".
The artist that comes personally to mind is the American photographer Edward Weston, whose large format black and white images proposed that the camera was a tool of study and a tool to capture beauty in art.
Edward Weston
Starting in the early 20th century, he composed soft and alluring photographs of portraits and nudes, as well as cabbages and sand dunes. The camera allowed him great new opportunities to see and compose the beauty around him. Some of his greatest and most elegant photographs are of the still-lifes inhabited by curling peppers (Pepper #30, 1930; below) , twisting Shells, (1927) and frilled Toadstool, (1931). These were the images I took most pleasure in.
In 1932 he and some fellow artist formed a group called the F/64. This group was named after a camera setting, where the aperture of the camera is open wide and extremely sensitive to light. It is challenging to photograph at aperture F/64 because such little light is needed, and the exposure is often lengthy in time. Weston had been experimenting with this method a few years earlier, and gives very lively composure to the objects photographed in such dim spaces. He was focused on the intrinsic beauty and abstract in his photographs.
What compelled him to look at detailed objects is perhaps the same that compels me. The bizarre world he captures in the crystalline plane of space in Melting Ice, Arizona, 1938 is something of a spectacle remenisce of the new images I have printed.
Although my technical skills are not a remarkable as Weston, I sense a similar energy in both our works, an influence I feel grateful to share.
[Source: Crist, Steve. Edward Weston: 125 Photographs. AMMO Books, 2012.]