The sea is both subject and object. Herman Melville called it the greatest metaphor of them all. Stand at the edge to take its picture, and, as Dominic Pote shows in a new series of work, youre more in than out of it. As a vision, it can be consuming, and the shoreline is the wild frontier. So how to catch on camera a thing thats constantly changing?
The digital capacity for ever-faster exposure times can make us feel were closer to capturing what Henri Cartier-Bresson called the decisive moment. But have we not also come to understand that time is rhythmic, unfolding, a continuum; how can we divide it into a series of discrete frames?
Hokusais Great Wave illuminated what we now know to be the fractal point the point at which things fall apart. And anyone whos ever tried to catch a wave knows how easy it is to fall from the grace of that particular moment. Was the poet Louis MacNeice a secret surfer? Times face is not stone nor still his wings we, being ghosts, cannot catch hold of things.
To discover what the eye of the storm really felt like, JMW Turner had himself lashed to the mast of a tall-ship and headed out into deep water. On terra firma, Richard Long takes a line for a walk, and then traces his steps in stone or on paper, mapping himself onto the landscape.
So where is the picture? In nature? In the imagination? Maybe, Dominic Potes work seems to suggest, it lies both outside and inside, there and here, on land and at sea, endlessly between us.
To follow, six photographs from Dominic Potes Shorelines exhibition at the Hellenic Centre, and four from previous work.
Shorelines: six photographs
Oceansurf 1 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
Its the lived experience I want to convey. And sometimes we experience things as a blur, sometimes we edit out the blurs. Which one is most accurate?
Oceansurf 2 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
These pictures were taken on the volcanic shoreline of a Greek island, Milos. The island was formed two or three million years ago.
Oceansurf 3 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
The volcano is no longer active, but the shoreline is a place of constant change a landscape in flux.Ive been working at this particular shoreline for four years.
Oceansurf 4 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
Sometimes it looks almost lunar still, white, mysterious. At other times its wild, the boundary between land and sea forever shifting. Theres constant movement, constant transformation.
Oceansurf 5 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
My aim is to suggest how we experience time as a continual, moving, horizontal experience, scanning the landscape as we move through it.
Oceansurf 6 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
Im not trying to convey the the Cartier-Bresson split second in time, but the actual feeling of being in a place, walking through it across a period of time, a duration.
A selection of Dominic Potes earlier work, including industrial landscapes, photographs of Prague and London, and the following images, can be viewed on his website.
Shorelines 5 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
The camera is hand-held, in line with my body. I dont look through it with my eye. Sometimes I start off on my knees, or crawling, recording the landscape from different angles.
Shorelines 3 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
The negatives are scanned - digitally printed, but not digitally manipulated. As long as I keep walking is as long as the picture lasts. I use a long exposure time and a long piece of film. Many of the photographs are three or four metres in length.
Shorelines 4 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
Its less about the traditional eye-view than about the bodys experience, how it feels to be in time, and to be in a particular place. Id like to convey that direct experience as much as possible.
Shorelines 6 (cropped). Please enlarge to see full image
Chance, the random event, happy accident, lucky mistake a photograph owes a lot to that, and can be beautiful because of it. If I stumble, its on film.
