Mark Kimber, Return to White Cloud Lake, 2012

Adelaide photographer Mark Kimber makes pretty still lifes with a plastic toy camera. He has an exhibition at Sydney’s Stills Gallery called The Pale Mirror: dreamy, soft-focus tabletop miniatures. They have a quaint humour, sometimes a slightly menacing quality.

The benign image above is a take on Edward Steichen’s 1903 Pictorialist landscape, The Big White Cloud, also a dreamy image. Kimber seems to have used cotton wool for the cloud of the title.

Kimber’s is a romantic art saturated with the history of photography. His images are lush, fervent. He looks for “situations where the play of light, form and landscape converge in time and space to create an elusive and ephemeral piece of theatre.” 

You can view the whole exhibition here.

Edward Steichen, The Big White Cloud, Lake George, 1903

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