For the latest meeting of Keswick Photographic Society, one of our many well-travelled members, Keith Snell, took us on a journey of contrasts from the snow-covered Lofoten archipelago above the Arctic Circle in Norway to the desert state of New Mexico just above the Tropic of Cancer in the USA.
Keith illustrated how the snowy landscapes of the Lofoten and Senja islands in Norway are often bathed in pastel shades from the early morning sun:
although some of the monochrome images brought a sobering shiver to his presentation. There were some iconic images of fishing villages with their traditional red barns:
as well as striking aurora borealis displays in the winter sky.
Keith is well-known for his exploration of more creative photography styles and there were a few images on show taken using intentional camera movement (ICM).
The creative images came much more to the fore when we moved to the deserts of New Mexico when, instead of ICM images, we were challenged by colourful expressionist landscapes.
These were created from multiple exposure images produced in-camera by manipulations of the camera settings. As Keith explained, this approach was a major reason for visiting northern New Mexico where he was seeking to take inspiration from the pioneering American abstractionist painter Georgia O’Keefe, who had lived and painted in that area for over fifty years. Indeed, he stayed in the very hostelry where O’Keeffe first visited New Mexico and which had also hosted famous landscape photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, not to mention DH Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung!
But Keith started his journey in southern New Mexico and visited a national wildlife park that is host to sandhill cranes and snow geese that migrate there every winter from northern America and Canada.
He also visited the otherworldly White Sands national park with its pure white sand dunes derived from the underlying gypsum rock. The area is near to where the first atomic bomb was detonated and has become familiar from the recent Oppenheimer film.
When moving to the rocky outcrops of northern New Mexico, we were reminded that the lands originally belonged to native American ethnic groups and we were shown images of a still-inhabited adobe Pueblo settlement.
The main show though was the geological features of the area with the amazing shapes and colours of the rock formations.
The evening was notable not only for the variety of striking landscapes on show but also by the variety of photographic techniques used to produce the images.
Keith’s enjoyable presentation was well received by our members both in the meeting room and by those attending on zoom.