Join the conversation
Subcribe to comment rss feedWhen Random meets Order
Murray White
Murray is an enthusiastic photographer of the natural landscape in Australia. His lifelong passion for the analogue process and remote area travelling emerged in the days when colour transparencies were king but has further evolved with the transition to exclusively B&W work. For him, the intimate landscape is a compelling partner when viewed on the ground glass of a large format camera, or observed with more fluidity through a well worn Mamiya 7.
The author of six 4WD guide books and numerous magazine and newspaper articles, Murray has spent the last five years revisiting Australia’s less popular areas with a monochromatic vision, content to satisfy more personal ambitions. He is a regular contributor to BETTER PHOTOGRAPHY magazine and the VIEW CAMERA AUSTRALIA website.
I have over the last 40 years or so, pointed my cameras at many of Australia’s most picturesque locations. For much of this period it was the unrelenting colour, the sun, and the oozing beauty of our land that maintained my momentum; a pace that seemed never quite enough, as I pounded a familiar treadmill to capture these palpable visions on film.
Over time, my photography became more exotic, both in destination and in its technique, as I attempted to wring even more rawness from the genre, yet in terms of personal expression, I was spent. I felt restricted by a sense that landscape, as I traditionally defined it, offered only a limited capacity for something new, something deeper, something to connect with.
There became a growing incongruity between the latent complexity of a setting and how I chose to photograph it. The idea that ‘the scene’ must be preserved as a visual unit, at the expense of a more ‘molecular’ assessment, seemed to discourage any interpretation that overlooked the most obvious elements. While it’s possible to appreciate the nuances of a landscape without photographing it, is it even viable to do the reverse? Can we photograph a landscape without fully immersing ourselves in its complexity? I believe that we can, and I believe that I was!