honorable mention
Keith Leighton united kingdom
title
Journeys Through Imagined Lands
Now, years later, I've decided to travel again through these mysterious lands and to bring back my own record. The journey back to our world through the slim gaps in reality is a harsh and tortuous one, leaving the images scarred and warped. Drained of colour and precision they exist now as fleeting and shape-shifting as thoughts - much as familiar places in a dream can change in a moment yet retain their identity, their essence communicated as feelings rather than appearances.
They are all produced in the studio, careful arrangements of odds and ends found lying about, photographed through crude hand made lenses.
In tandem with his commercial work, over the last few years Keith has been journeying through various personal ideas about photography. In contrast to the commercial rigours of delivering accurate and precise representations of the real world, these parallel endeavours are giving rise to images in which the actuality of the objects in front of the camera is secondary to what the patterns of shadow and light evoke in the mind at an intuitive level.
With a spirit of exploration in mind he builds his own crude lenses with which to create unspecified, impressionistic images, a deliberately nebulous collection of visual clues built from nothing but the mundane detritus that is found in the studio. The resulting black and white photographs with their blurs and warps can be considered as being somehow stressed and worn, scarred even, by their transformative journey from the commonplace to the beautiful, back from the imaginary places where they were discovered.
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entry description
As a child I was fascinated by stories of early explorers and the strange and dangerous lands they journeyed through, of how people could pit themselves against such fearsome unknowns to discover something new. Being a child - and not a particularly brave one - I never saw these places nor any of the wonders that existed in them myself. I did, though, piece together my own journeys in my imagination. An amalgam of what I saw, maybe in a print from a murky glass plate, or read in the tired jottings from a journal perhaps lost for decades. Fragments of other people's reality became interwoven with my own visions to create places that didn't exist in reality but which were nonetheless real as landscapes that expressed loss, loneliness, hope and courage.Now, years later, I've decided to travel again through these mysterious lands and to bring back my own record. The journey back to our world through the slim gaps in reality is a harsh and tortuous one, leaving the images scarred and warped. Drained of colour and precision they exist now as fleeting and shape-shifting as thoughts - much as familiar places in a dream can change in a moment yet retain their identity, their essence communicated as feelings rather than appearances.
They are all produced in the studio, careful arrangements of odds and ends found lying about, photographed through crude hand made lenses.
about the photographer
Born 1965, Keith worked very hard at school and increasingly less hard through higher education and a succession of very business like jobs. Eventually the pretence became too much and he turned his back on corporate life to return to his first love, photography, to set up a commercial studio in 2004, which is still thriving.In tandem with his commercial work, over the last few years Keith has been journeying through various personal ideas about photography. In contrast to the commercial rigours of delivering accurate and precise representations of the real world, these parallel endeavours are giving rise to images in which the actuality of the objects in front of the camera is secondary to what the patterns of shadow and light evoke in the mind at an intuitive level.
With a spirit of exploration in mind he builds his own crude lenses with which to create unspecified, impressionistic images, a deliberately nebulous collection of visual clues built from nothing but the mundane detritus that is found in the studio. The resulting black and white photographs with their blurs and warps can be considered as being somehow stressed and worn, scarred even, by their transformative journey from the commonplace to the beautiful, back from the imaginary places where they were discovered.
back to gallery