Witch’s Peak, La Palma

My work is focused on the evocation of pure and ancient landscapes. These images are about picturing an unspoilt landscape, where evidence of modern human interference has been kept to a minimum. In attempting to preserve these environments by creating timeless pictures I try to evoke images from photography’s origin. Working with infrared film and split toned prints, there is the feeling of an historical image, the sense of someone observing these places with a camera for the first time.
Unlike the highly expensive precision tools I use in my cinematography, the Russian Horizon cameras I have been using for this work are plastic, part of the same aesthetic that has brought the Lomo and Holga cameras to prominence. It is in a way a very disposable camera – often I feel I make images with them despite the cameras rather than with their help. Yet the kinds of pictures they allow me to take seem to have a real affinity with infrared imagery.
Kodak HIE infrared film is itself an endangered material. Now discontinued, it was originally used for aerial reconnaissance. Incredibly sensitive, it requires delicate handling, and its lack of an anti-halation backing makes it very liable to flare. But this also gives a magical quality to my subjects – the blown out highlights of living vegetation literally glow with light. Because the material itself has an unknown quality – it photographs part of the spectrum not visible to the naked eye – making images with HIE is not so much documenting or recording a landscape – as transforming it.