Greg Neville, installation at Edmund Pearce gallery

Chemistry of Chance, my exhibition with Greg Wayn, has opened at Edmund Pearce gallery, the excellent photography gallery situated in the Nicholas building.

This project is a first experiment in abstract photography, a category I’ve always been suspicious of as it contradicts the mission of photography to record reality. But after reading about Concrete Photography, a separate category from ‘abstract’ which goes to the physical essence and ontology of the medium, I changed my mind. The exhibition is a series of pigment print enlargements of scanned black & white reject prints found in darkroom rubbish bins. This may disqualify it from a strict reading of ‘concrete’ because they are interpretations, one generation away from the originals, not the actual things. That was deliberate in our interpretation, we wanted them to be our own ‘art’.

They are intriguing images. As the sun sets on photo-chemical photography and it drifts into a twilight of cult use, its materials and processes acquire a certain romance. It’s a dimension that is not available to digital photography.

.