Patrick Henry, Director of Open Eye Gallery, profiles the work of Manchester-based photographic artist David Penny.
Manchester-based artist David Penny makes absorbing, provocative still life photographs. It’s not easy to do this. Photographs are bound up with our desire to know something about the world out there - their lifeblood is contingency. The canon of photography (as art) is dominated by the documentary tradition. The further still life photography gets from the language of documentary, the more it swims against the tide. Still life at worst circumscribes an airless space, cut off from the world, accessible only by the obscure, absolute desire of the photographer.
Penny has found some unusual ways to breathe life into this space. He creates simple, meticulous compositions, photographing single objects against plain backgrounds, populating his frame with undecided objects - objects that pose questions and engage the imagination. His approach is tentative and interrogative - it makes us look again at what surrounds us and where it has come from. It's photography from first principles - innocent photography, strangely reminiscent of the earliest experiments in photographic picture-making by Niepce, Talbot and others. ...
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