Photography
by David Trout
The
advent of digital photography has had an enormous impact on the way artists
work and use visual images in the 21st Century. As an artist I never
really considered the use of photography as a viable medium. I was trained as a
painter and never developed a passion for the technical side of traditional
photography. I have, however, always liked photography and always taken photos
for personal reference.
I
started to use digital photography in the context of my painting about three
years ago. Initially, I was interested in the concept of digital painting and
manipulated images so as to relate to my abstract painting through the use of
Photoshop. The decision to exhibit pure photography lay in my need to move
back from abstraction to the figurative in my painting. This I found at first
difficult to do in painting, but the photography allowed a freedom to explore
the visual work directly rather than from the cerebral perspective of my
abstraction.
I visited South
Africa at the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005. These photographs are
about how I look and respond to my homeland. They relate strongly to my formal
concerns in painting, especially in reference to structure and the use of
colour. They also capture the role of the artist as observer, which I find
relevant in terms of how I experience returning to my homeland.
