Night visions: Darren Almond’s full-moon landscapes

Sean O’Hagan writing in The Guardian tells us about landscape taken just by the light of the moon.

Taken over the course of half an hour at night, Darren Almond’s images expose what happens when ‘you give the landscape longer to express itself’.

At least two guiding spirits hover around To Leave a Light Impression, the new show by British artist Darren Almond at White Cube, Bermondsey. The most obvious is Charles Darwin, in whose footsteps Almond followed to make several of his images. The other is the lesser-known Scottish nature writer, Nan Shepherd, whose book, The Living Mountain, provides the exhibition’s epigraph:

“So there I lie on the plateau, under me the central core of fire from which was thrust the grumbling, grinding mass of plutonic rock, over me blue air, and between the fire of the rock and the fire of the sun, scree, soil and water, moss, grass, flower and tree, insect, bird and beast, rain and snow – the total mountain. Slowly I have found my way in.”

Almond is trying to find a way in to a landscape tradition that he belongs to, but stands outside. His preternaturally still photographs evoke all kinds of precedents – from painters of the natural sublime like Caspar David Friedrich to early photographic pioneers like Edward Steichen and more recent ecologically attuned photographers including Robert Adams – but they also evince a kind of beautiful unrealness…..MORE

 

Details of the exhibition can be found here

Darren Almond
To Leave a Light Impression
22 January – 13 April 2014
South Galleries, Bermondsey