Martin Newth
mail@martinnewth.com
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  Event Horizons (2022-2026)
     
     
  Martin Newth's large, black and white photographs are paradoxically grounded in both history and the digital age. Evocative of 'hard-won' images such as those captured by Ansel Adams, where the viewer might envision the heroic photographer hauling heavy equipment through majestic landscapes, these images utilise similar photographic apparatus but are created without the need to leave home.  
     
     
  The landscapes that these images depict are those of the artificially constructed worlds of contemporary computer and video console games, and the large, antique 10x8 camera is pointed at the TV screen. Rather than the photographer, the heroes of these images are, perhaps, the teams of games designers who have deployed the latest artificial intelligence techniques to craft the almost real looking landscapes.  
     
     
   
     
     
     
 

 Conceived during Covid lockdowns, this series of works extends the homemade approach to both materials and process. Martin Newth’s research has tapped into online sustainable photographic communities to explore the use of household materials and garden plants in concocting the photographic chemistry needed to develop his negatives. In addition, employing partially fogged, out-of-date photographic paper, the images require very long exposures ranging from 2 to 30 minutes, significantly slowing down the normally frantic pace at which the gamer experiences the landscape. This deliberate juxtaposition of hyper-analogue technology results in fingerprints, dust, and light leakage leaving indelible marks, as if the very act of creation is seared into the image, thus creating a complex interplay between the real, the constructed, the physical, and the immaterial.

 
     
 

 

 
     
     
     
 

 

 
 
     
     
     
     
   
     
     
     
     
     
   
     
   
     
     
   
     
     
     
     
     
   
     
     
     
     
     
   
     
     
   
 

Accompanying the black and white landscape images are highly focused colour photographs of the rosemary bush from Newth’s suburban garden, coffee granules, and vitamin C powder, revealing the ingredients used in the DIY photographic chemistry and providing a sharp contrast to the enigmatic landscapes. Together, these images explore materiality, time and place. While most landscape photographs encourage viewers to connect with depicted locations, here, it is the location of home and the process by which the photographs are made that the viewer is invited to contemplate.

 
     
     
   
     
     
     
   
     
     
     
     
     
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