Chris Byrnes
 artist & photographer

 Quiet Light Silent Space

These works explore the quietness of morning or evening, the silent space before the day takes a breath, a solitary morning walk or moment of quiet contemplation. 

Although perhaps more fitting to previous works, the following quote still expresses some of my thoughts about photography in general.  It speaks of the personal connection and commitment to art practice.

"But there is another kind of seeing that involves letting go. When I see this way I sway transfixed and emptied. The difference between the two ways of seeing is the difference between walking with and without a camera. When I walk with a camera I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter.

When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment’s light prints on my own silver gut. When I see this second way I am above all an unscrupulous observer.[1] "

My research explores experimental, historical or elemental photography [referred to in this research as first photography]. This requires pushing the boundaries of old photographic technology as they collide head-on with contemporary digital imaging practice.  Pivotal to my analysis, and lying beneath the surface, is a personal struggle that is easily textualised as ‘the need to be known as an artist and the desire to remain unknown as a private, somewhat introverted individual being’.  At the very beginning it must be said, that while I recognise that I am consciously and subconsciously discovering and exploring the bigger questions in life, and in particular, the search for my place and understanding of the world around me; I have chosen to select a segment of the natural and scientific world, and to look at the relationship between science, light and art.  My aim is to experience or release the fundamental, essential, true, original, and primal elements, as they are revealed, across all stages of the performance ritual of making or discovering photography. 

The narrative will often reflect daily life and in particular, physical spaces I exist within. The decision to work within my set methodology comes out of both an aesthetic principle [one linked to the atmospheric style of painter Clarice Beckett (1887-1935) and the tonal experience of photo-impressionists such as Harold Cazneaux (1878 -1953)], and a desire to further expand upon this by mixing the scientific principles from early and first photography, and the directness and honesty of the physical sciences with ideas realised through human imagination.

My work explores images of outback New South Wales.  I have taken a naïve, sentimental and emotional response in an attempt to describe the beauty, strength, weather (heat), physicality and uniqueness of the outback and the people who live within her.