Bevil Templeton-Smith - Microscopic Visual Adventures

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 14:00 - 15:00 GMT-5. CHECK YOUR TIME ZONE

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/bevil-templeton-smith-microscopic-visual-adventures-tickets-881285216807

I enjoy defying photography norms. Ultimately, a photograph is no more than a collection of spots of colour in an enclosed space. How those spots are arranged informs our visual center, which forms a pattern in our brain which we like or dislike. The pattern can be pure black, or a lovely landscape scene, and everything in between. My photographs of crystals of various household substances in polarised light on my microscope have no recognisable subject to inform their scale. There is no figure or still life object to help to categorise that pattern. The result is a colourful vista of shape and form. They elicit a visual adventure, but leave the viewer questioning what they are looking at. This is intentional. The viewer must like it or leave it on this basis, not because it is a picturesque landscape or artful nude.

Those familiar with my photographs are often forgiven for referring to them as my paintings. However paintings they are not. They are absolutely photographs of absolutely real things which can be retrieved and re-viewed in my microscope, and sometimes photographed with a different configuration of polarising filters and wave plates, and at different angles, to produce entirely different photographs, much like a landscape photographer might revisit and photograph the same landscape at different times of the year, or from different perspectives.

I am very enthusiastic about my ongoing project to make photographs that defy the norms, and show a fresh perspective on the world, bringing to light a set of real subjects which are hidden, and very difficult to find, see and photograph.Different sets of images in this project have been recognised by inclusion in a successful joint exhibition titled Polychromo, at Alveston Fine Art in London in March 2023. With this work, I was also very proud to be awarded 2023 non professional Photographer of the Year in the Fine Art category in the International Photography Awards in New York in October 2023.