“How we understand our landscape and our part in it …
has a profound influence on how and what we remember and take from our
landscape and how we glean meaning from newly encountered places.
Peter
Ranyard’s work, River (2016), a
selection of 28 images - shot on film and carefully manipulated in
post-production, evoke a deep sense of longing and a nostalgia for a place we
all hold close, but rarely get to. For
some, it may only be an imagined place, for others it is a place of childhood
adventures, or hiking trips with best friends or first loves, or perhaps places
only consumed through novels and other’s descriptions. Ranyard allows us to hear the tumbling of
the river, to feel the damp of the ferns as they brush against us and to
venture into something only able to be experienced once. The
poet, painter and art critic, John Berger, writes of photographs as having the
ability to show us what was and what is all at once and Ranyard’s River embodies this, drawing us into the
images to pause and imagine what
the conditions were really like the moment the shutter was pressed and the
image made - each image standing as witness to his experience of the wild, and now, as a record of a moment
passed, leaving us yearning for our own journey as we wander from photograph to
photograph.
Ranyard’s
images reflect a manageable wilderness, a wild we can escape to, one we can
tame just enough to gain an understanding of what lies beyond. They also present something exotic to most
of us – something unseen and not yet experienced, giving us a glimpse of an environment that is
ancient and all but untamed by permanent human inhabitation. The series creates a landscape of imagined
memories, one where viewers can see themselves in the photographs, capturing
the images and stirring up distant recollections of experiences possibly made
into the wild – although we can’t be sure
we made them. Through his mix of
aerial, traditional landscape and detailed close up, each carefully composed
and heavily manipulated to reveal just enough information, we can sense the
rugged environment, the cool climate, the smell of earth and soil and
decomposing foliage and overlay our own memories – real or otherwise - on his
images. We are allowed to follow the
journey Ranyard made over a number of years to Poronui, an area outside Taupo,
New Zealand, almost as if at his side, feeling the isolation and emptiness of
the plains, the denseness of the rainforests with the river serving as link to
an outside world. Ranyard employs a deliberate
use of dense, deep blacks, diffusion and grain to create distance from direct
memory and experience – each manipulation serving as metaphor for our
interaction with the environment, just as our memories are often romanticised
and almost always selective of any experience.
For most of
us, the reality of an adventure to an untouched place seldom matches our
imaginations. However, Ranyard’s images
create a space where we can revel in the joy of feeling small in the world,
satisfying an urge to be elsewhere and to explore, matching our imaginations
with reality. It goes without saying
that the world has changed, just about anywhere in the world is accessible,
however, in River, Ranyard reminds us that there are still pockets left untouched - stirring
the environmentalist, the explorer and the romantic in us all to go on that
journey, to follow that river, to venture into the unknown, to discover the
exotic.
