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It may seem something of a contradiction in terms but the
exhibition Year One, now being held in Newlyn Art Gallery and billed as a
collection of "camera less photographs", is by an artist "with a reputation as
one of the most progressive figures working in photography today.
"Bristol-born
Garry Fabian Miller, who has lived and worked on Dartmoor since 1989, and whose
earlier work was landscape-based and focused upon the horizon between the sky
and land or sea has, in fact, been producing photographic works made without
using a camera since the mid-1980's.
While the methods he employs hark
back to the pioneering days of photography in the 1830's, that is, the passing
of light through objects and filters of oil or coloured water and glass on to
photo-sensitive paper, the vivid, almost optically blinding, abstract images he
produces are a far remove from anything the early 19th century photographers
made or even dreamed of making.
Capturing and conveying a sense of that
magic moment, of the often indescribable quality of light seen when the day is
either about to begin or end, his "camera less photographs" can be read and
interpreted in any way the viewer wishes.
Miller says: "The pictures I make are of nothing which exists in the
world... what I'm trying to suggest is a state of mind which lifts the spirits
and give strength and some kind of clarity."
Whether or not his trio of
images in the lower gallery and the two dozen in the upper gallery, plus those
in the collector's cabinet in the centre of the gallery, pictures that emanated
from the year, October 2005 to September 2006, he spent working in his darkroom
producing a new series of images each month, will achieve anything like that
remains to be seen but there's no denying their power to impress and
intrigue.
Miller edited the many images he made during the 12 months he
dedicated to the project to a total of 96 works, eight per month, and gave each
of the months a name from the Celtic calendar, "not for any spiritual
association but that those names referred to the natural cycles of the year,
that is, the time of brightness or the seed fall".
It is interesting to
learn that "just as the work made one day informed the work he did the next, so
one month's series either directly led into the next or prompted a radical
change of direction ".
From the large work Exposure IV in the lower
gallery, an example of the images he was making before he began work on Year
One, to the two smaller one that flank it Samonious, Single A and Samonious,
Single D, and from Elembious to Edrinios in the upper gallery, his images
possess much of the mysticism and power of early icons.
A "camera-less"
photographer who has enjoyed exhibitions of his work in Europe, America and
Japan, and who is represented in a number of public collections from that of the
Metropolitan Museum, New York, to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Garry
Fabian Miller's Year One can be seen in Newlyn Art Gallery until April
20.
The gallery is open from 10am to 5pm, Wednesday to Saturday and on
Sunday from 11am to 4pm until April 20.
article copyright THE CORNISHMAN
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