Anthony Curtis
“My photographic work over the past ten years has primarily focused on an exploration of place, not so much the literal picturing of a location – but the metaphorical evocation of my experience of space through visual art.
My early work, the Journey through the eye of the Pinhole (1997-1998) developed from the idea of human impact upon the environment. I sought out pathways through the bush, picturing them with a pinhole camera and large-format black and white film. The resulting images reflect the act of traversing the landscape, the split view of the two conjoined images visually suggests human vision, looking up and then down as you walk.
The Horizon series (2000-2003) grew from a personal project to explore my early life and family history as it was associated with Clifton Beach, in southern Tasmania. [It] creates a conceptual and visual link between the passage of time and the landscape by repetitively recording the identical subject from the same location over an extended period… [and] was created with a pinhole camera and medium-format colour negative film.
Created while on an Arts Tasmanian Wilderness Residency, the Rocky Cape series (2004) explored ideas much like Journey through the eye of the Pinhole – referring to the act of seeing and how we look around us when traversing the landscape. The images I created took the form of a photographic collage; utilising a high-resolution digital camera I captured hundreds of scenes, building up individual images from numerous single frames.
My recent practice has featured the built, rather than natural environment. The Streetlife series (2004-2005) features the city, picturing selected aspects of the urban world. As with my previous work, I have worked directly with my surroundings, intuitively responding to my everyday experience through the medium of photographic art.”
(Anthony Curtis 2006)
