I am delighted to introduce new artist photographer Paul Walsh on our live collective platform.
To start, taken from his website: “Paul
Walsh is a British photographer interested in the relationship between walking
and photography. He engages with the world on foot and creates work drawn
from the physical, psychological and historical experience of walking. He
began his career as a fine art landscape painter. During this period, he became
increasingly interested in the portability of photography and started making
photographs of his exploratory walks around the industrial hinterlands of the
Midlands. He went on to study a BA in Fine Art and Documentary Photography at
Liverpool John Moores University and an MA in Photography at the University of
Brighton. Paul is also a founding member of the photography collective MAP6”
How did I come to know about Paul Walsh? I was simply browsing
past events on the net when I came across a show held during the previous
Photomonth. There was a collective show and Walsh’s photographs stood out not
only for the project that interest us but also on a personal level. When
looking at art works I always try to put myself in a sort of innocent mood. I
put my thoughts and knowledge aside and let my body feel, then comes the mind.
From the first glance I was captivated by Walsh’s subtle and large landscapes.
They are not really landscapes as such, they are not engaged documentaries and
do not follow any trend either. They have a gaze, a very special aura. There is
something outside the frame that makes you feel confident and participant. You
dive into those visions that seem so trivial somehow because Walsh has to
ability to transcend the moment. His camera doesn’t record graphic and/or
emotional moments only but it manages to transpose a time capsule in which you
are immersed. Walsh’s originality lies in his ability to observe and make sense
of the elements that come together in harmony, and then comes the camera. His
method is very much the one of the painter as he once was (and still is I
guess)
Then comes the walking. He is obsessed with its practice and I
cannot blame him. There is something extremely gratifying and reflective about
it. The world unfolds piece by piece as your walk progresses. The volumes and
shades contrast and merge in your journey. Walking is a constant discovery, a
new question at every curve and a new analysis as the day passes by. Walking is
a therapy and it makes you see more than the camera use only would. The regular
pace needed is your heartbeat and your vision endlessly alternates between the
path ahead of you and the vast open. This constant mechanism if well trained is
your own trademark and enables you to travel between point A and B in a sort of
osmosis where the inner-self and distant thoughts live combined and peacefully.
It is about you and the world. So Walsh examines the world carefully and by so
finds answers for himself (and for us)
I then paid more attention to one particular series titled All Things Pass as many photographs
depicted the East London area. They appealed to me for their melancholy and
sincerity. They embodied perfectly a state of mind, a state of search
where nothing comes to you explicitly but where you have to trust your heart
and make your senses more acute to every detail that surround you. Eventually
your mental dispositions and awareness make you feel the adequate moment. It is
a unique journey where the signs are distant and for you to decipher later. Walsh’s
walk in itself is the process and photography is just a tool to remember and
share. But also let me copy below Walsh’ statement as it will explain precisely
the reasons behind this particular journey.
It was in the autumn of 2012
when I got the news of my mother’s illness, a heart condition that eventually
left her unable to walk. Over the coming months, I travelled back and forth on
the train between London and Birmingham to visit her. As I gazed out of the
train window, I wondered about what it would be like to make the journey back
home on foot along the canal I could see running next to the train line. I
decided that for once, I would walk back into the city and house where I was
born.
I plotted a route along the
hundreds of miles of canal towpath that connected the river Thames in London
with my parent’s home in Birmingham. In the current light of my mother’s
illness, I soon became caught up in thoughts about the ephemeral nature of
things as I walked. Everything in life comes and goes and the same can be said
for places. Like my mothers story, the canals story is constantly changing,
once a bleak industrial landscape, it has now transformed into a green space
where people escape too. As I progressed the deteriorating factories of the
city gave way to pastoral landscapes. I became more aware of the fleeting
nature of the world around me as everything I happened upon came into view
before disappearing behind me.
With All Things Pass, I set out to make a walk for my mother. I
wanted to show her the places that she would not be able to walk through that
lie beyond the view of the canal from her bedroom window. Above all, I wanted
to show her that with time all places can deteriorate yet manage to recover,
transform and eventually find a way to live again.
I think Walsh’s photographs express perfectly the creative
process as a whole. From the aims and practice he sets himself to the discovery
he let himself filled with. There is nothing more disappointing than working
towards a goal where most parameters are rigorously controlled as you and we
will learn very little from it. Walsh has this maturity and strength to let it
go. This is why his work is so honest and unique. By capturing
almost nothing he reveals a lot. That is his way of being engaged with the
moment and the creative perspective. His method makes him vulnerable but
extremely aware and sensitive to a whole human experience. Whereas painting is
a laborious mental task and physical craft where you attempt to revive the
past-seen or transcend its experience, photography has this function of freezing almost instantly. That said photography wrongly used records an infinite range
of moments and it takes someone very alert, caring and skilled to combine all
those attributes into one single frame. Walsh’s photographic walks are like a
religious experience.
