FORMATIONS

"A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is, therefore, a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety."  — Ansel Adams

F O R M A T I O N S  C O L L E C T I O N

I’ve known the New Zealand landscape intimately since I was a child. Inspired by artists like my teacher, Colin McCahon, I’ve explored it since my earliest paintings. There was so much to see, hills and more hills under an overarching sky. My paintings became wider and wider as I strived to capture landscapes beyond the edge of the canvas.

As I shifted my attention to photography I was inspired by historic New Zealand photographers like the Burton brothers, who used large plate cameras to capture extraordinary, crystal-clear detail. George Chance’s photographs were wonderfully pictorial: charming, elegant, idyllic landscapes.

Mounting my camera on a rotating tripod head, I used the f22 stop to record 360-degree landscape views. In the studio, I ‘fused’ groups of photographs together on a computer to replicate the large-scale photographs taken with plate cameras. Each panoramic landscape consists of a multitude of individual photographs. The edges of these images are frequently left ragged, to show where one photograph is joined to another.

As my photographs became horizontally longer, the early narratives offered intriguing opportunities to combine separate moments into an image to describe an actual journey through a landscape; these photographs often, but not always, are read from left to right.