Peter Massingham
All photographs hold a fascination for me, and my concern is how the activity of picture-making can promote a stronger, more profound sense of relationship to the world in which I live. I concur with the words of Robert Adams. “At our best and most fortunate we make pictures because of what stands before our camera, to honor what is greater and more interesting than we are. We never accomplish this perfectly, though in return we are given something perfect--a sense of inclusion. Our subject thus redefines us, and is part of the biography by which we want to be known.”
The images in this project originate in photographs taken on a 50-mile route through SE London known as the “Green Chain Walk” The work may reveal a demonstrative raw state, a heightened awareness, where prosaic phenomena take on an otherworldliness. The artificial light from street lamps and buildings, the effects of long exposures on colour film, and the pared-down backdrops of night, combine to suggest and amplify associations not otherwise detected in the distractions of day.
The monochrome images in this section represent a small selection of work made in both the USA and United Kingdom. They are an account, a mark of respect for locations - often spectacular, sometimes unexceptional - that I have encountered on my travels and long walks. In my attempt to avoid rhetoric: the social, political, environmental and psychological aspects of locale are only implied, or acknowledged as the inevitable traces of our physical presence in this world.
Peter Massingham
petermassingham.co.uk
All Images from Signs/Shadows/Residues & Landscape, copyright Peter Massingham