Looking at Looking at Landscape exhibition - Peter Harvey
Peter discussed his films and photography:
“What I am interested in with photography is trying to look at what photography does that other art forms don’t. Two aspects are how photography can play with time and how it can deal with reality. People talk about the objectivity of photography when it actually involves many subjective choices about what is taken and how it is shown, but it is an accurate depiction of reality. I want to see what can be done with extending time or the immediacy of time.
When Field Day was planned I couldn’t imagine what it would be like. We are not used to thinking about outdoor galleries! I made a film of the exhibition using time lapsed photography. A photograph was taken every 10 seconds and 18000 individual shots were stitched together. ”
This stop-motion film was shown on continuously on the 4 screen display in the gallery.
Peter also brought the countryside into the gallery with a film of Malham, Glimpsed Landscape, which was viewed alongside photographs from his Constraining the Landscape series
“The Constraining series is about how people see the countryside through barriers, both perceptions of their own history and the politics of landscape, which has a history of constraining people. You cannot look at landscape without thinking whose landscape is it and the consequences of that. There is a whole mythology about the naturalness of landscape when a lot of it is developed. Layers of landscape have been manufactured by history and politics. You could argue that landscape is not just geology and geography but is culturally determined.
Pole Dance is about making something aesthetically pleasing discarded material. I took a series of pictures of a black plastic bag caught on a power cable between Keighley and Bingley.”