Capturing reality

 

For Luke Gregory photography is a creative release, free from technicalities and sophistications. Expressionist some way. Backed up by studies in sociology, the Australian photographer, describes the reality through decisive, and direct images, rich in substance. Poetic tracks that depict the ambiguities of contemporary society.

 

«My work over the past 12-18 months comprises part of an ongoing and incomplete series that captures the ‘cultural artefacts’ of everyday social processes, interactions and structures of late modernity. The subjects of my photographs are typically manifestations of the complex and sometimes jarring interstices between the domains of nature, culture, leisure and industry. In many of my images there is a pervading sense of objects, landscapes or beings captured either in transition or in the act of vanishing; whether it is in the face of entropy or in the complex shift from their place in the agricultural, industrial, suburban or natural spheres to a more ambiguous, post-industrial state of being. My images seek to engage the viewer in a subtle narrative that speaks of deep structural relationships of control, submission and transformation and which yields a sense of both quiet despair and a delicate hope. The process of making these pictures represents an effort to capture the unconventional beauty, melancholy and poignancy of the banal and the oft-ignored. I am compelled by the unique possibility that photography presents as a medium for distilling the essence of these fragile and ambiguous moments, which, when taken out of their contexts and presented as discrete images, have the effect of being at once both eerily familiar and vaguely disconcerting. The images I produce are aesthetically and compositionally simple. My subjects are usually centred in the frame and my approach in the field is more visceral than deliberately conceptual or meticulously technical. My straightforward compositional style naturally drags the viewer’s eye into the image quickly with little opportunity for resistance. The bluntness of this approach serves to leave the viewer with little option to but to engage in a deeper (if ultimately ambivalent) consideration of the social and cultural circumstances and events surrounding my subjects at their moment of ‘capture’».

 

 

Photo:

© Courtesy of Luke Gregory

www.flickr.com/photos/g-rex

(click on the image at right for more pictures)