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Welcome! to the March 2023 newsletter.
The photographs featured above are recent works from 2022 and 2023, Cathedrals and statuary have long been part of my regular work but I have recently returned to figurative work with a new series, Portrait of a Model, a conceptual series of photographs where the model takes on a role. In the case above, the role of an artist's model with a reference to Sandro Botticellis' The Birth of Venus.
I have been planning to photograph Orléans Cathedral for many years. Sometimes I look for qualities in an image that can only be found at certain times of day and need the right circumstances to enable it. To remove as many traces of human activity I chose to use an ND (neutral density) filter, reducing the light levels, which on this occasion required a very long exposure of six minutes, so moving subjects would not register. I also wanted the sun raking
across the facade. Using an app called LightTrac it was clear that the sun begins to cut across the face of the cathedral in early/mid afternoon. On this particular Saturday on a September afternoon that would be 2.30pm. I believe it was a great success, people are still visible outside the building giving it a necessary human element.
To add to this, a subtle but important detail within the image is almost imperceptible - the Japanese artist, Hokusai, would sometimes define clouds in his woodblock prints by leaving the
top edge sharp but the underside slightly soft. A similar dynamic is achieved here. As the sun strikes the edges of the building, the hard architectural lines remain sharp and defined but the shadows over a period of minutes have softened edges.
The Madonna & Child, Aix-en-Provence, is a stunning almost life-size painted sculpture in the Church of Saint John (Église Saint-Jean-de-Malte) a Gothic Roman Catholic Church.
Wishing you all a fantastic March 2023...
Guy Sargent
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