threads of light
October 11th 2023
I was absorbed by this year's Prix Pictet exhibition, Human. This theme takes us through a range of experience: from war zones, across arctic tundra and over a garden wall; from childhood, through adolescence to parenthood. Storytelling is the thread through them all in as few as sets of eight or ten images.
Leaving The Garden, by Siân Davey, 2022, from the series 'The Garden', 2021-23
I was struck in particular by the work of Gauri Gill. Her Notes from the Desert were simultaneouly warm yet unsettling, of a place but outside of it.
Gera Artemova's War Diary was very much of a time and place. The pairing of images was an expression of the physical and symbolic aspects of existing on the cusp.of life and death.
That experience was also expressed in Where the World is Melting by Ragnar Axelsson, a portrayal.of llife in a fragile landscape , transforming literally beneath the feet of different communities.
This ihas been almost a twenty year project and Gauti Gill's has been in progress since 1999. They're powerful testimonies of the commitment of the photographer to portraying the passing of time, not only in the hundredths of seconds of a shutter frame.