American West

The scale of the American west is so vast that Directors of Western movies and photographers using large format view cameras are only able to describe a small part of it. It's an old cliché, but you have to have been there to experience it. Your vision here is always wide angle, the panorama goes full circle, the big sky, like the highway, goes on forever.

It has become the passion and obsession of artists who have simplified it in monochrome, photographed it's key features, made vast coloramas, painted huge canvasses, transposed it to lines or abstracted it to it's primary shapes and root colours.

As an artist, my first response would be to take you all there so that you could experience it for yourself first hand. My second response is to acknowledge the size of my quest and consider it futile. My actual response has been to look at the small pieces that make up the puzzle, the bedrock of the American wilderness, the parts unique to this landscape and absent from my experience of the UK and Europe .

My Photographs are true to my vision; I would consider myself a purist, a straight photographer; however I don't see with a monocle through a 2:3 rectangular frame in a snapshot of time. Like Thomas Moran and Jonathan Raban, I need more time to describe in detail what I'm seeing.

The Americas were considered the New World, by it's European settlers and the West was the newest of this world. It is also physically a far newer world than Europe. The landscape of the West is sculpted by volcanic activity, extremes of temperature, glaciers, rivers, torrential rain and scorching sun. I am drawn to the intimate fissures, cracks and fractures that expound the detail in this landscape.

My flash-drive holds a record of this landscape, seen by my eyes through the camera lens and remembered in my memory from the whole of my vision, from the foreground to infinity and from the brightest highlight to the visible shadow. As I survey the scene, left to right, up and down, I record the tiny fragments as digital images; they are later pieced together in PhotoShop to make a conglomerate of the whole picture, seen earlier in my mind's eye.

Development of Technique

I learned to use a digital camera and PhotoShop on the newly introduced Fuji FinePix 4700 in 2001 whilst making images for my ‘Proposed Re-development of Northampton'. As a teacher I wanted to learn from the new digital medium and as a photographer I wanted to embrace it, find and use its unique qualities to make a new kind of photograph. This camera came with its own 16mb memory card and although I spent a small fortune on a 125mb card I needed more memory for the location work I was intending to do. I bought a ‘Minds at Work – Digital Wallet' for £250 which had a capacity of 6 Gigabytes. Hundreds of 4mb photographs were taken for the ‘ Northampton ' pictures, many from other towns and cities, and these were then manually positioned using PhotoShop 6 as separate layers, their edges often softened with a soft edged eraser. The same approach, equipment and software was employed in the first photographs of my ‘American West' series of which ‘Douglas Firs, Navajo Loop, Utah comes from.

My camera progressed to the FinePix M603 and the digital wallet was replaced with a portable CD recorder. In 2003 I was using a Sony Cyber-shot 8mb single lens camera and since 2008 an Olympus E3, 10mb, with a 12-60mm lens.

PhotoShop has generally been replaced as the programme has updated. Today instead of having to combine layers totally manually I can make use of ‘photomerge' which automatically stitches them (to a point). However even now, with 2GB of RAM, I can only automatically stitch a handful of frames together, I can still take a week (over a period of months) to complete a major image.

Douglas Firs, Bryce Canyon NP, Utah 2002 - 2005

In his image of the Douglas Firs, Bryce, (first picture in slideshow above) Dave has seamlessly fused about 30 different images taken in a narrow canyon in Utah , where several perspectives viewed simultaneously don't cause visual discomfort - just intrigue. “The montage process effectively shows us more than we'd see at a glance - but with an authenticity that would be distorted by a wide-angle lens”, Dave said.

He explained: "I go to some lengths to try and include the process in my work. You can see the shape of a photographic frame, so you can see the size of the single frame and therefore you can start to deduce how many frames it's taken to make the picture, and that the picture's been made up like that. But most people will see the picture and think that it's just a single photograph. "He added: "I'm actually quite a purist as a photographer. I'm seeking the truth. I'm trying to record things accurately, truthfully, like a document, and that's a difficult thing to do when it could also be considered image manipulation."

- Andrea Charters, North Devon Journal – 22nd March 2007