email: info@greengallery.co.uk

 

Until Now - Praxis 2 Gallery

David Green – Artists Statement

The work on show in ‘Until Now’ is a selection of my photography from the last 10 years, detailing the development of my work with the constructed photograph. I have been teaching photography full-time for 15 years in Northamptonshire and have been exhibiting my work since 1993.

 For the sake of this show at Praxis 2 Gallery my definition of a photograph is any image made through a photographic process, be it traditional black and white photo paper or the lens of a digital camera. The constructed photograph is any photograph made up of more than one single frame, negative or print.

 Leaf Works: After I started to teach photography I soon noticed, and started to collect, discarded black and white photographic paper left in the darkroom. These were sometimes left for days, and would turn into beautiful images through the act of light, developer and fixer. I was captivated by their range of colours - some makes of paper had purples and yellows, others browns and oranges some had greens and they all included black, greys and white. These found images were to be an inspiration to me as I started to make work using the same process.

 Triptych: Making the photograph up from three, four or five consecutive negatives gives the viewer a narrative, splits an image into comparable sizes.  You read the panorama from left to right as it was taken. These images are my memories of specific times, places and trips. They are a visual documentary, or travelogue, of where I have been, what I have seen and how I have felt. I photograph on impulse using the available light. All light has its own beauty. I photograph what I see, when I see it to record a real memory, rather than 'faking' my memory with a pre-ordained time of year, day, weather condition or light.

 Digital composites: Midway through the summer of 2000 I laid my Olympus SLR to rest and took up the challenge of digital. The future is digital, I do not see the advent of the medium in the same terms as the invention of photography but rather in having a similar impact to the invention of the 35mm camera in 1925.

 My Camera holds a record of the 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 minds eye. My photographs aren’t manipulated in the contemporary sense but simply juxtaposed or joined digitally.

 Bideford, North Devon is my new home and it is thanks to Andre Gard at Praxis Gallery that I am able to introduce my Photographic works to you so soon after my move here.