Photography has become a preferred medium in contemporary art practice for many artists around the world.

Old arguments as to whether a photogrph can be art were dispelled years ago by artists such as Man Ray, Ansell Adams or Australia’s Max Dupain. Content, particularity of vision, special effects, technical exper-tise or mastery, playing with accidents and embrac-ing them have all been part of photography’s steady acceptance as the significant art form of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

When the German artist Joseph Beuys famously declared ‘everyone an artist’ he could not have imag-ined the situation today where a mobile telephone could double as a more powerful camera than the best digital cameras eight years ago. How we define what is art or photography becomes blurred when technology affords so many of us easy access to high quality digital cameras.

The artists showcased at North gallery build from several differing yet similar approaches towards the conundrum of what is art, from a photographic per-spective. The lens is an eye, receptacle of light. We generally do not question how we see or even what we see unless we have been challenged, seduced, shocked, surprised or disgusted, then we refocus and reconsider what it is we are looking at.

Within art the notion of the beautiful has become a hotly disputed arena of debate globally since the birth of photography. What is beautiful to one per-son is an afront to another. Photography has histori-cally addressed issues of beauty through glamouris-ing and idealising the subject in ways once claimed by painting

above, Troy Allwright ‘The Bevy’

The four featured artists use nature as the basis or site of their work. Troy Allwright, Kirralea Birch, Louise Cooke and Neal Pritchard focus on the world they inhabit, each with a different emphasis or approach.

Allwright’s exhibited works are closely observed and sensitively composed travelogues, images we often see from the corner of the eye too late to capture as the moment has already passed. The fleeting clas-sic shutter stop of the camera where patience and general loitering with intent pay off with imagery emphasizing close observation.

The elusive and fleeting moment so readily associ-ated with photography is a seductive lie. Photogra-phy is boring and demanding in equal measures. In nature the photographer bares witness to events, dancing to the rhythms of light, shade, movement stillness and time. Troy Allwright’s photographs reintroduce the viewer to nature and the many crea-tures who share the planet with us often from what appears to be within our own confines.

Kirralea Birch’s ‘Underwater Portraits’ play beneath the waves in the waters off the West Australian coast-line. Each location offers different light or mood in the same way any image created above land does. We are placed in the position of a diver where the frozen moment of the camera and our displaced point of view filter our vision of the subject. These self portraits place the artist in a dimension we often experience but never quite so immersed.

Birch stages these photographs, rehearsing and choreographing them. The works are collaborative, accidents happen, the subject is only partially framed the exposure eerily reassuring and convincing. The female figure is suspended in nature. We are denied character, only observing the figure partially as in some aquatic peep show. The photographs are edgy in some undefined way. Our eyes rarely examine anything beneath the water. Here we are confronted by something strangely elegant yet unsettling.

Birch presents a world where colour, texture, light and space surround the artist, in some uncontrolla-ble state where distortion is natural. Did we inhabit water as easily as we now inhabit land? Kirralea Birch, ‘Untitled’

If Kirralea Birch’s works seek to literally go beneath the surface of the earth to present her visions Louise Cooke’s work celebrates the surface of everything washed ashore or existing above the waterline.

Louise Cooke creates photgraphs many would love to have taken. Her work exudes a simplicity and clarity of subject where a rusty door, shells, leafy under-growth or breathtaking beach scenes seem just right.

Cooke’s attention to quality extends from the loca-tion to the finish the work. Each surface and texture is selected and balanced against another. The result-ant image has a completeness and ease which belies the detail and technical considerations Cooke brings to the realisation of an image. It is the perfection of surface Cooke presents in her easy on the eye land-scapes and still life arrangements of idealised flotsam.

These beautifully crafted images embrace a simple wonder at the world, its colours, textures light and nature. Cooke’s titles are playful or thought provok-ing where she hints at associations the viewer may make for themselves.

Louise Cooke, Shore Thing II (rocks)

Neal Pritchard, ‘Indijup Sunsert’

Neal Pritchard and Louise Cooke share the photogra-phers passion and curse, endlessly searching for ‘the perfect shot’ . How perfection is defined is as fleeting as beauty. The mind flits from object to experience to value in its endless search for the unattainable. The photographer seeks to fix that experience as a jewel-ler delicately crafts some precious stone. For Neal Pritchard the single image is as far as it could be from the act of taking that single image.

Neal Pritchard’s work is a celebration of digital pho-tography. Each image is an amalgam of up to three hundred photographs of the same scene. A photog-rapher in the vein of Ansell Adams, where the image and its values are scrutinised and organised, only the point of focus is used, and so on until an image is realised.

A photographer’s methodolgy defines their working practice in exactly the same way a painter’s style be-comes their trademark. For Pritchard his rigorous and disciplined approach is evident throughout his travels and preparations in the realisation of an image. The photographs are painstakingly worked on a computer before they are printed.

The analogy with the American photographer Ansell Adams is not simply a reference. Neal Pritchard’s at-tention to detail in the realisation of an image is at the level of the pixel. His photographs form the basis for a work where the raw data is sifted like fine ingredi-ents to be crafted in ways more akin to forensics than any romantic notion of the journeyman artist.

Neal Pritchard, ‘Yosemite’

While these works can be discussed and pondered upon there strength rests as easily on the eye as they appear. They appear effortless as photographs yet are as complex in their realisation as any work of art.

J.N Blank North Gallery III/ 2010

a. 7 Boston Quays Mindarie WA 6030 Australiap. 0061 89304 4566e. northgallerydevelopments@gmail.com

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