I’ve been working on a show to be held at the Found Gallery in Brecon which is coming up in a couple of weeks – 24th May to 24th June. It’s my first show for a long while and looks at my bird photography as inspired by five quotes.
I’ve re-used frames from various past shows – stripped down and painted – and for the first time float mounted the prints rather than window mounted as I’ve always done before. I’ll also be selling A4 archival fine art prints at the gallery along with the book I worked on with my brother Mike ‘Songs of Place and Time – Birdsong and the Dawn Chorus in Natural History and the Arts’
Selection is always difficult with so many images to choose from, but you’ve got to go with a gut feeling really and the quotes have helped to narrow it down too.
The quotes from which I’ve taken the images from are here below with a few of the images from the show.
‘To express dynamic motion through a static moment became for me limited and unsatisfactory. The basic idea was to liberate myself from this old concept and arrive at an image in which the spectator could feel the beauty of a fourth dimension, which lies much more between moments than within a moment. In music one remembers never one tone, but a melody, a theme, a movement. In dance, never a moment, but again the beauty of a movement in time and space.’
Ernst Hass – 1950.
‘Thoreau’s theme is not the remote and stupendous, but the daily and hourly miracle of the usually unnoticed beauty that is close at hand. What we need is, he felt, not the unfamiliar but the power to realise that the familiar becomes unfamiliar once we really look at it, and that every aspect of the natural world is in its own way “awful”.’
Joseph Wood Krutch – From the Introduction to ‘In Wilderness is the Preservation of the World’ – 1962 – Eliot Porter / Henry David Thoreau.
‘Birds live in habitats. When seen in the field, they are part of the great world around them which is their haunt … A photograph that is all bird – even if one or two close up portraits are desirable in a series – and gives no impression of the environment, fails to achieve its full purpose.’
G. K. Yeats 1947 – Bird Photography – 1946.
‘The object of the bird-photographer should not only be to secure portraits of the creatures he loves in stiff statuesque postures – the living prototypes of the dwellers in glass cases. Though such are useful, he should go further and try to portray the living bird in some characteristic pose or action suggestive of its daily life, or else in some unwonted and peculiar posture telling its own particular story.’
Bentley Beetham – Photography for Bird Lovers – 1911.
‘Sometimes whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and these geese the whirlpool turning above it. Nothing had prepared me for the sound, this dense, boisterous din, the clamour of a playground at breaktime, a drone-thickness flecked with high pitched yells, squeals, hollers and yawps – ….’
William Fiennes – The Snow Geese – 2002.
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