End frame: Headland by Jackie Ranken

Kay Hathway

I have always been an opportunistic photographer but not until the last few years, have I been able to take photography as seriously as I should have, much earlier.

I live in Sydney and have photographed widely in Australia, especially in outback and beach locations, both of which I love. In the last few years, my travels have also taken my camera and I to many other parts of the World and I have undertaken a number of workshops with Jackie Ranken and Mike Langford in the South Island of New Zealand.

I like making multi exposure images and when working on intentional camera movement I often confuses onlookers. I prefer to make softer monochrome and black and white works. Printing is an important part of my image making process and my prints are often the basis for encaustic pieces and hand made books.

kayhathwayphotography.com

This enigmatic image is not a highly coloured epic landscape, sharp from corner to corner, sunset or sunrise glowing in the background. This is more like a shy little wildflower peeping out amongst the mighty forest trees, a small dot of great beauty in a shaft of golden light. And amongst a plethora of traditional colourful and highly detailed landscapes, it stands out as a rare minimalist work.

If I’d not known the story of Jackie Ranken’s book ‘Aerial Abstracts’, I might look quite differently at this photograph. As a traditional landscape image, I would see a hillside, trees and the distant horizon shrouded in fog or cloud, maybe some snow. The mystery I always enjoy is all there.

But no, the images in this book were made by Jackie while flying upside down, in the few seconds available to her at the top of a loop, as the passenger in her Father’s biplane.

Fear of flying never got a look-in!

At the time Jackie was using her Mamiya 7 medium format rangefinder and Fuji Neopan 400 film. So that’s 6x7 inch format and 10 shots per roll of film. The originals of these photographs were printed by Jackie using the Lith printing process.