Terra:extra can be described as a series of Unnatural Landscapes or even Landscaped Imaginations. With a nod to Antonioni’s “Blow Up“, I transform the fringes and banal corners of my images with exaggerated enlargement, tone and colour, aiming to deconstruct and subvert some of the classic notions of photographic reality. The pixelated textures, the noise and distortion all create a heightened/brut effect far from purism, far from current Photoshop compositing technique and nostalgic picture treatments: I call it databending with intentionality. Somewhere between micro and macro views of one world and the creation of another, these visions and enigmas are places that simultaneously do and don’t exist in time, like some newly discovered islands mapped from a wandering sailor’s memory. And as that itinerant artist, this is how I experience the world – as an ongoing conversation between detail and context, between the inner world and the outer, between description and invention.
ADm
Born in the UK (1960) and now living in the Languedoc region of France, I’m what the French call deraciné – rootless. I studied Graphic Design & Production at Sir John Cass School of Art in London and became the Assistant Editor of the UK’s premiere skateboard magazine before emigrating to California. Later, as guitarist and bass player with the seminal NYC art-rock group Hugo Largo, I toured the US and Europe, recording two albums for Brian Eno’s Opal/Warner Bros label. I was the principal photographer of the book “On The Road Again” (BBC Publications) and have created Sound Design and Music for numerous UK film and TV directors, agencies and events. I’m self-taught and my first camera was a Kodak Instamatic 126.
Weekend portfolio selected by W.M Hunt
