My images are born out of joy, frustration and anger. I love our planet, and broken-hearted by how we abuse it, how we fail to connect the dots. I don’t really make nature photography, at least not how we normally interpret the term – “nature” has become a description of something “other” – unspoiled and potentially imaginary, something different from the urban environment in which many of us live. For me, photographing anxious humans in rush hour traffic, is documentation one of the Earth’s species behaving weirdly. It’s in our nature.
I grew up in the Irish countryside, with an idyllic childhood that was anything but urban. Over time I saw the effects of creeping urbanisation and industrialisation – the death of rivers, the poisoning of land. Yet the countryside remains somehow ‘beautiful’.
My photographs of unforgiving wilderness, wild animals and blue icebergs set out question our romantic relationship with remote, harsh and pristine environments. The images are lovely, yes: but they resonate with a quiet tension; all may not be right in the Garden of Eden.
While the frozen regions of our planet have the power to ignite imaginations, for most of the seven billion people on Earth, the Arctic and Antarctic remain abstract and unreachable. I’ve been lucky enough to voyage north and south by ship, to experience the serenity of the oceans and polar regions – and realise how finite our planet is.
Rapid change is taking place at the poles; CO2 emissions are contributing to the loss of Arctic sea ice, and melting ice caps are fueling sea level rise. We are starting to grasp how badly we are fouling the nest, and how our acts have repercussions elsewhere. The future of the Arctic and Antarctic is intertwined with our own. I want to make people not only fall in love with their home planet, but to start giving a damn and take action to protect it.
I never set out to be a photographer, but I am forever becoming one. I recently explored my influences, made lists of polar, nature, and expedition photographers. While I love what they create, and the places they photograph, what I discovered was that a very different set of image makers influences my sense of colour and light, my composition, the humour that’s inherent in some of my more urban work. I discovered that I keep returning to the images of Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, Belgians Harry Gruyaert and Stephan Vanfleteren, and Americans Joel Meyerowitz, Joel Sternfeld, Berenice Abbott and Lee Millar. All very different in their artistic metiers, but certainly not campaigning environmental photographers or polar explorers.
One of my greatest influences is the stained-glass work of Harry Clarke (1889-1931), which contains blues – such blues you have never seen. Except perhaps, in the light refracted through snow so compacted over thousands of years, that the red end of the light spectrum is swallowed up, and a blue iceberg is what remains.
Links:
Website: http://www.davewalshphoto.com
Gallery: http://www.thecopperhousegallery.com/exhibitions/22/overview/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/davewalshphoto
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davewalshphoto
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