David Burdeny
Water Temple, Japan, 2006
Water Temple, Japan, 2006
David Burdeny
David Burdeny’s photographs play with time and scale. His imagery suggests a formalized landscape where perspective scale and time momentarily become intangible.The viewer sees repeated dualities of stillness and movement, intense detail with blank atmospheric abstraction, man made objects found in ocean horizons, black and white images printed on colored paper, all reduced to present to the viewer a sublime experience.
Usually square in format, the photographs most often bring our initial gaze to the centre of the composition, but not to a floating point around which compositional elements sit in quiet equilibrium; rather, to a particular detail. Compositionally, Burdeny’s works discard the simple distinction between figure and ground because quality of light and attention to the periphery play an integral role in this balance. His acute architectural sensibility evokes the lived space that surrounds and comprises structures within their context rather than the simple reduction of meaning to figurative forms and their internal coherence.
David Burdeny: Shorelines
From the shorelines of Japan, Northern France, and the Pacific Northwest, these works present my abiding interest in the thresholds that divide and connect the sea to land. I am fascinated with the quality of light and the spatial immensity of the ocean. I have enormous reverence for feeling so small in the presence of something so vast, where perspective, scale, time and distance momentarily become intangible. Photographing as a process of clarifying this quality, I work towards creating formalized, liminal spaces. The glory lies not in this act of clarification or reduction, but in the experience of what is left - sublime experience located in ordinary space: a slowly moving sky, the sun moving across a boulders surface or sea foam swirling around a pylon. Exposed onto large-format black and white film under the light of dusk and dawn, the shutter is held open for several minutes, recording the ocean and sky as it continuously repositions itself on the negative, a process both dependent upon and vulnerable to chance. The resultant image is an accretion of past and present. Each moment is layered over the moment immediately preceding it - a single image that embodies the weight of cumulative time and unending metamorphosis.
Process statement
All of my work is shot with a Hasselblad medium format camera and 80mm lens, or a 38mm Hasselblad SWC/M on black and white, silver based 120 roll film and developed by hand in small reel tanks. Archival quality output is through a Cymbolic Sciences Lightjet 5000 printer onto Fuji Crystal Archive Photo Paper.
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