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Robert Poole
Robert Poole is a “retired” University Professor. His scientific and laboratory background led him away from “yet more computer work” to traditional photography, wet processing and large format cameras. He still prints in silver-gelatin but increasingly in platinum on fine art papers - perhaps the summit of ‘alternative processes’. He is also one of the few to have embraced Mike Ware’s New Chrysotype process for printing in pure gold. He has attended workshops with monochrome masters including John Blakemore, Fay Godwin, Jan Groover, Alan Ross and John Sexton. He has exhibited in the UK, USA, China and Australia and been published in numerous periodicals and books. He won the 2020 Dr Mike Ware Award for alternative photography.
For as long as I have photographed ‘seriously’, I have been a fan of Eliot Porter, the American photographer. There are thousands of wonderful images in the numerous books he has published. I might, for example, have chosen one from the ground-breaking In Wildness is the Preservation of the World (1962) with quotations by Thoreau or the Glen Canyon portfolio (see later). But I chose this because it is a mysterious image and also because my wife and I are fortunate enough to own a signed dye transfer print of this image. In a room hung with many fine monochrome photographs, only this one is in colour. And what colour! There are the warm oak leaves of a New England Fall, lively greens, deep near-blacks, and the bright almost whites of trunks that flank the centre of the image.
Clearly, I am not alone in admiring this image, even here in Sheffield. In 2016, Adam Long chose this photograph in an end frame article, having seen it on the wall of a climber’s pub, whose walls were adorned with framed landscape photographs. Adam describes this as a ‘big print’, but the original is not big at all, just 34 x 27 cm, typical of Porter’s dye transfers. I’m not a fan of big prints.