Images from
CLOSER
An exhibition of photography by SANDRA ELMS and TONY KEARNEY
as part of Shimmer Photography Festival
1 — 23 September 2012
Primo Estate, McMurtrie Road, McLaren Vale
Click on image for larger view
as part of Shimmer Photography Festival
1 — 23 September 2012
Primo Estate, McMurtrie Road, McLaren Vale
Click on image for larger view
This series of images came about over a couple of years, just the same few small objects in the same favourite spot revisited each time, our kitchen table, near the window, and usually afternoon going into evening. The pleasure and satisfaction derived from this revisiting of subject and location is in the myriad possibilities arising from a handful of variables: a tiny shift in angle; the wide open aperture and shallow depth of field revealing new layers of sharpness as the focus ring turns; and the effect of the light behind often rendering form as silhouette or intensifying the blue of evening sky.
These favourite small objects are actually a set of small glass battery jars from the 1900s, their feral whorls and crinkles distort and refract light in complete antithesis to the optical precision of the lens that the light is also travelling through. The ensuing aberrations are welcome ones, the added layers of glass making their astigmatic contribution to this process of light gathering.
The lens is invariably so close that the nature of the object in front of it is difficult to determine, the resulting image can be read as something other — and other-worldly — suggestions of landscapes both familiar and alien, beguiling and strange, worlds within worlds. Countless undiscovered microcosms offer themselves up for exploration and a place for imagination to roam.
These favourite small objects are actually a set of small glass battery jars from the 1900s, their feral whorls and crinkles distort and refract light in complete antithesis to the optical precision of the lens that the light is also travelling through. The ensuing aberrations are welcome ones, the added layers of glass making their astigmatic contribution to this process of light gathering.
The lens is invariably so close that the nature of the object in front of it is difficult to determine, the resulting image can be read as something other — and other-worldly — suggestions of landscapes both familiar and alien, beguiling and strange, worlds within worlds. Countless undiscovered microcosms offer themselves up for exploration and a place for imagination to roam.