Don Suggs

 

 

My central studio practice alternates between painting and photography, with the governing concept being an ongoing argument with received ideas about the landscape.  This polemical exercise has been the focus of six extended bodies of work, going back to the early 80’s.  The photos for these prints are shot digitally and flipped to black and white using iPhoto.  They are never “Photoshopped.”  There is no  “recomposing” of the camera image.  All refining of the as-is camera shot simulates those we might have learned in the wet darkroom using graded papers and filters, cropping, dodge-and-burn, and spotting.   What sets the basic photos apart from the usual is that they are composed in-camera to accommodate a sizeable “interruption,” in the circular overlay they are all fated to receive.  My yearly photo trips amount to a hunt for alignments of formal elements along a central vertical axis of the picture/scene, leaving room along that axis for the compositional element that will be implanted later.  The role of that eventual concentric screening form is complex.  Of course it disrupts the usual picturesque comforts we seek in landscape views, but it also informs us.  Sometimes it may give us back the native colors of the scene, or the color composition may have been chosen to function symbolically, imparting suggestions of things hidden but implied in the photo.  The thing that blocks our view is an opening in the picture to further meaning. – Don Suggs