Landscape painting is often viewed as an archaic mode in this post-modern era of destabilization of the image. When social context matters, ideologically speaking, more than beauty or depictions of reality, then the very idea of capturing an aspect of the land through the paintbrush seems quaint, romantic and irrelevant.
Photography, however, by bringing technology to play in its visions of landscape, enables the viewer, through light, framing and techniques of isolation, to reassess his relationship to the land and its significance. In this age of environmental degradation, the artist's role in enabling people to re-connect to the earth through fresh depictions of the planet is crucial.
Paul Saturley's landscape photos startle the eye with their stark beauty and assist the viewer to question her place as a part of or separate from the natural world.
Paul Saturley's Biography
Saturley was born on Christmas Day of 1954 in Newfoundland. After traveling, he later moved to Edmonton where he obtained an English degree, raised his son, and worked at Grant MacEwan college as a photography instructor, as well as continuing freelance photography projects. He has seen solo and collaborative shows produced across Canada. His photography and digital illustrations have been published in periodicals throughout North America and Europe.
Due to the interests in literature inspired by his English studies, Saturley has pursued collaborations with poets such as Jannie Edwards, creating the illustrations and design for her book Blood Opera: The Raven Tango poems, as well as working on sites like Casa Diablo, a section of his web page Inkriver
that blends text and images in surreal fashion. William Blake, Dante's Inferno, and metal music, particularly that of Opeth and Amon Amarth, are several of his key sources.
His work also appears on Flickr and the new site Quadrants where he collaborates with this author. Saturley's oeuvre is diverse, encompassing digital work, traditional photographs, and book and web page design, with his focus ranging from landscape shots to portraits and travel pieces. However, his landscapes that form the sequence Strange Days is his most intriguing and essential work to date.
Strange Days: Reconfiguring LandscapesThe photos in this sequence, whose title was inspired by Jim Morrison and The Doors' mystical and moving second album, were all shot with infrared B & W film. Most of the settings are of in and around the river valley in downtown Edmonton AB, Canada, with some other shots taken in Calgary and Ottawa. These images are marked by their use of eerie light, their device of framing the tree, root, field or building as if it is isolated in its own universe, and their attention to inhuman detail.
While many landscape photos show a varied expanse, Strange Days focuses on one element in its environment. Even when there is more than one building or tree, there is always primary attention paid to a singular aspect through his use of the natural light and shadows. These are not sublime landscapes, easy to romanticize. They are difficult fragments of a fraught urbanized nature.
Strange Days attends to elements of the land that are often ignored, whether it's the city tree or the snag in a field or the root cast beside the path. In so doing, it reminds the viewer of both the essential part that all natural participants play in the ecological cycle and it shocks one into easily imagining a world devoid of humans and their destructive capacities.
While paintings of the land can seem anachronistic in today's more brutish world, photography, with the appropriate use of light and an attention to detail, can enable viewers to re-see the natural landscapes that surround them and thus perhaps enable them to grow in their association to and respect for the earth.
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