With World Photography Day this week we decided to look back at some of our flagship photography commissioned works and how they challenge the images we are bombarded with everyday by offering a new perspective on the world.
Living in our heavily technology-driven world, we are constantly consuming images. Whether this be on our Instagram feeds, Facebook advertisements, Google Maps pages, GIF’s or meme sharing between friends – there’s no denying images are everywhere.
So where does this leave photography as a fine art form and how does it sit within this new digital world?
At Art Pharmacy we have worked with a range of different photography artists on a variety of commission projects, all with a unique take on what photography means to them. From flying high with aerial photographers to capturing X-ray composition in Thailand, we work within all facets of the broad and exciting scope of photography artists practice.
In 2019 we worked with aerial photography artist, Steve Back, to create hoarding across various levels at Castle Towers Shopping Centre, including a unique aerial abstract photography of the area and surrounds, interpreting the Castle Towers slogan “Better Life Moments Everyday”. Steven hired a helicopter and did two shoots over two weeks, flying over several suburbs including Castle Hill, Blacktown, Hawkesbury, Parramatta, Narrabean, Blue Mountains, and Ku Ring Gai National Park, among others. The images captured interesting and beautiful moments from the unique angle of above, calling his work “Above and Beyond”.
Back, sees his aerial photography practice, as a way to focus in on the built environment and reveal the lurking and unseen, in the world around us. Aerial photography can help us see existing landscapes in a new way and offer perspective. The potential hoardings created an opportunity to take passers by eyes away from the images on our screens and help see existing landscapes in a new way by offering a new perspective.
Another photography artist we worked with for a series of commissioned works at Tiffany & Co’s Flagship Store, was Brendan Fitzpatrick. Throughout his work, Fitzpatrick explores the creative potential of the radiograph, using both chest x-ray and mammogram machines. For this project we engaged Brendan to use his photography practice to create X-rays of Tiffany’s products within their signature blue colour palette. Brendan even travelled to Thailand for this project! The x-rays went through an experimentation phase, with lots of planning to work out what objects and composition would look best with the merchandise.
The outcome was a modern, dynamic, fun and interesting take on Tiffany’s collection. His pieces make us question what’s behind an image or object with interactive imagery usually reserved for medical purposes.
Earlier this year we worked with architectural fine art photographer, Tom Blachford, on a corporate collection at 80 Collins Street Melbourne. We chatted this week with Tom to find out more about his photography practice.
Tom’s works capture the intersection of long exposure photography and exploration of the built environment, seeking to transform predictable and known environments into surreal and dreamlike worlds. Obsessed with capturing the moments of clarity, colour and mystery that exist just beyond the limits of our human perception, Blachford explores the ability for his camera to bridge our worlds to dark worlds beyond our reach.
The commissioned work, which sits in a client board room overlooking the Melbourne city scape, is an image from the series called Aberrated Lux. This abstract series explores natural landscapes but incorporates vigorous, unpredictable and random movements by the photographer to create a dragging and blurring effect. This “dance” combined with long exposure has a similar effect to allowing each point of light to become wet paint and the camera sensor to become a canvas that can be dragged across it to blur and diffuse the world. The results are beautiful, unpredictable and unrepeatable, giving the viewer a chance to sit and ponder the beauty in capturing a fleeting moment in time.
Tom says that photography is about capturing the world in a different way to how people see it and about opening a new perspective through imagery. He believes that the growth of technology is moving photography art into a new digital space and changing the legitimacy of photography as we know it. In a world bombarded with imagery, fake news, photoshop and AI, photo realism is more “worthless than it ever has been” and the opportunity now is to play in the realm of uncertainty and work in the space to put question marks and poke holes in reliability of photography revealing a new space for photography altogether.
At Art Pharmacy we believe photography art should be used more in public space. Whether it be to provide a moment of perspective, fun or meditation, fine art photography makes us see images in a new way. It takes us away from the hundreds of these we see on our screens everyday and into the world of an artist. We are excited to be working more and more on projects in the digital and photographic space and offer a new perspective of the world we see everyday.
Do you want to see more photographic art in your life? Using our outcome driven process, we are here to provide the necessary link between these artists and your project.
