honorable mention
Patty Maher
title
The Salvage Mission
I was caught by the idea of giving some of these vehicles a new life and a final story by ‘salvaging’ them through photography – by digitally extracting them and placing them into a new background in the context of a story, so that the true beauty of their rust and decay could be appreciated through the restorative powers of space and imagination.
Everything deserves a final story.
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entry description
In the early winter of 2022, I became aware of a car graveyard quite close to my house. At first sight I was entranced by the rusted, broken and decaying vintage cars that were slowly being reclaimed by nature. Each of the vehicles in the yard once had a life and a story all its own, but those stories had ended, and they were now left to rot and decay in a tangled mess of earth and metal.I was caught by the idea of giving some of these vehicles a new life and a final story by ‘salvaging’ them through photography – by digitally extracting them and placing them into a new background in the context of a story, so that the true beauty of their rust and decay could be appreciated through the restorative powers of space and imagination.
Everything deserves a final story.
about the photographer
Patty Maher is an internationally recognized, award winning fine art and conceptual photographer based in Caledon, Ontario. The inspiration for her photography comes from an exploration of storytelling in both natural and urban settings. Working primarily through staged self-portraiture and portraiture Patty is widely known for hiding or obscuring the faces of her subjects using only posture, gesture, symbol and colour to convey emotion. Her photography disrupts the boundaries between real life and the otherworldly, the surreal and the fantastic, and envision the world in a transformative light. In telling these stories she invites the viewer to become a co-creator in meaning, leaving the stories open ended but touching on basic and universal emotions.back to gallery