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Thomas Peck

The real pleasure of photography is that it forces me to slow down and really look. That’s never easy in our rushed world, so a chance to stop, look and see is truly valuable.

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Water, Agriculture & Abstract Beauty

‘A picture is worth a thousand words’ goes the adage. And that’s certainly true for photography which, as a descriptive medium, has always been used to tell stories. Whilst the single image can communicate meaning instantaneously, stories come into their own when a selection of images is put together as a series. A sense of narrative. But the meaning of the narrative depends on the viewer’s ability to link the images: “Unlike film, which is truly plastic and continuous, a series of photographs is a sequence of arrests in time; the interstices are filled by the viewer” wrote John Szarkowski (Director at Moma, NY) in Looking At Photographs in 1973.

How much more difficult does it become, however, for the viewer to link the images when they are abstracts as we see here in these shots by Edward Burtynsky? Our desire for meaning is so strong that even though it is difficult to know initially what these images literally represent, we still look to link them up into a story.

What do we actually see? A series of geometric shapes, squares, circles and lines. There seems to be a progression from one image to another implied by the repeated shapes contrasting with the changing colours and tones. The first image is green and fresh, the second is predominantly brown and grey, in the third the circle seems to be flaking off the surface, and the lines in the circle have decomposed by the fourth image. From bright green fertility to dirty grey/green decay – it doesn’t take us long to suspect that this is a representation of the flow of time and the natural world, even though the shapes in these images seem anything but natural.