Darkness Visible

Darkness Visible
There is an apocryphal story of the painter J.M.W. Turner having himself lashed to a mast during a
storm and deciding that if he survived the experience he was bound to record it. I say apocryphal for
it appears that Turner was as good a showman as he was a painter. It is a story that sticks, an
unctuous and oily legacy despite Turner’s light hand with paint, to any attempting to work with
landscape, even photographers. There is a demand that nature must be experienced so that it can
be translated, it must be seen as wild, irrepressible and above all sublime.
I went on my own journey of a few hours through turbid weather and heaving seas to make this series
of work. Instead of a masted ship I was on a tourist ferry in Milford sound, one of the wettest places on
earth. There were few on the boat but we all had our lenses in cameras or phones to record the
experience. The camera, like Turner’s story, allows us to appear centrally within nature as both maker
and viewer. My story doesn’t have the derring do of Turner’s, it is a modern version where nature is
visited rather than visited upon. We seem to believe there is less nature now and place ourselves
apart, outside of the natural course of things. An amazing conceit that I have never really understood.
My interest in photography is not in the “what has been’ of the image but rather the ‘what could
be’. When we look at a photograph we never really see what we are looking at (the print, the
screen) but rather what we think was before the lens. Time is upset as the past happens in a
contemporary field and a myriad of desires awaken. In this series I hope you ’sense’ the
elemental of water on water on water; rain, waterfall and sea. Fear the great danger of water,
the force of it and breath the vapour it becomes. May it be a metaphor for whatever you desire,
a metonymical aspect of the storm, a mnemonic for your own travels. And I hope you are dry
when you do it, because I was soaked.
Carl Warner
January 2015