Sudden feelings

 

Josh Murfitt as a modern picturesque tourist uses his travels to portray the landscape. He does it, however, unlike the painters of the eighteenth century, to fix in time his emotions rather than recording ideal scenarious in contrast with the real world. No sublime landscapes but the desire to represent the places without a look of approval or disapproval. For the young English artist photography is a means to traspose his sensations into space. In this sense, the journey becomes a necessary dimension to discover unexpected or pleasant feelings, as he tells us.

 

«Yes, it’s true that alot of my photos were taken on trips to different places around the UK and Ireland. I don’t seek to purely document every aspect of these travels, though - there is alot I leave out. Much more important to me is the bigger picture, and how each photo makes me feel - whether or not it captures the way I felt about being in a place. I think the feeling I look for is often one of peace, silence, and maybe an absence of distraction - and with that comes considered observation. The ability to think for a while only about the beauty of your situation and surroundings. Of course this isn’t always possible in real life - but I hope that in a photograph, it is.

In some instances I feel it is unimportant where a photograph was taken. Maybe, as with many of my photographs, it was taken in a place near my home, or somewhere I happened to be passing through with my camera, because the conditions were right and I came across something I liked. It is often my intention for photographs like these to have a very loose sense of place attached to them. Sometimes the things that catch my eye are things that look like they could be somewhere else, or anywhere. For one example, I took a photograph of a pine forest covered in snow near my home in Shropshire - a place with a very temperate climate, and where the overwhelming majority of trees are deciduous.

It’s perhaps easier to find places that give me this feeling in the highlands of Scotland, or remote areas of Ireland, which I have visited in the last couple of years - and there are of course many other places around the world I’d like to visit. In that sense, for me, photography and travel go hand in hand - one encourages the other».

 

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Josh Murfitt

www.joshmurfitt.com

(click on the image at right for more pictures)