Join the conversation
Subcribe to comment rss feedJonny Bell
Jonny Bell
Jonny is a UK based self-taught Photographer and sustainable development professional. Happy outdoors and with a camera.
He has a passion for image making and experimentation, with a fascination with light, process, texture and form. He spends as much time as possible looking for ways to express a wonder at the world, and how we live alongside and within it. Ultimately trying to create imagery that communicates and compels.
The consideration of form within space concerns me in this series.
Focusing on forms within the landscape and photographic space has been a challenge for me along my local environment of the East Anglian coast.
During a recent conscious decision to seek out new subjects away from the draw of sea, river, and estuarine environments, with all of the beauty and challenge of the acres of space, tone, light, texture and glorious saline, I stumbled across and was reminded of the field border planting of Scots Pine Trees across Suffolk and Norfolk.
Undertaken to reduce erosion, these borders of plantings have become synonymous with parts of East Anglia, in particular along the sandy coastal fields and across chalk lands of Breckland. Their twisted forms, often sitting on distant horizons within the imagery of the region, as sentinels to mass within the great swathes of space.
Through this series, I feel as though I have been attacking these lonely spectres of evergreen. Starved of mountains, boulders, and as my good Welsh friend extols ‘real landscape’, I have set upon them, demolishing, deconstructing and seeking to reform their shadows into photographic representations of their existing gnarled solidity.
This approach to subject and representation has been consistent in my work for some time now, incorporating the now much better-understood processes of in camera movement and multiple exposures. While working from a technical perspective, I hope my work; I feel benefitting from the adoption of a more structured and considered practice as I learn, transcends just considerations of the adoption of this technical approach.
I am striving through my images to find some essence of the subjects I ponder, for me, the use of multiple exposure and ICM suits a natural desire to abstract and deconstruct, a remnant of earlier drawing and painting practice likely, and to reform.
Form being key in this series, however at times implied and faint, leaving just shadows of its’ former self, and within context, juxtaposed with the landscape and spaces it sits within.
I hope the results achieve some sense of these aims and resolve the sense of subject?
