ARTICLE | The Toronto Star
360 Degrees: Picture is it take a long view
May 29, 2004
Art by Numbers by Peter Goddard
At Coop Gallery’s “Passage of Time“ show ending today, two veteran photographers showed the Canadian landscape via a skewed perspective: Manfred Buchheit with pinhole photography and Alex Turner with composite panoramic photographs.
“I started doing this a number of years ago when I was shooting landscapes,” says Turner, the 60-year-old artist artist/teacher. “But back in the mid-’70s it was difficult getting an entire landscape in a single frame. So I evolved into doing 360-degree shooting. In fact, I did an entire show at A Space where it looked like I was creating a whole world which looked like a Mercator projection (a cylindrical projection of a map) were the top and bottom of the image would be distorted.
Broadview and Danforth, digital collage, Toronto, 2002
“Part of it was trying to capture a moment in time. I found if there were an object moving in one frame, but the time I got to the next frame, the object would’ve moved there. That got me thinking about the whole idea of movement in film.”
Turner says he’s largely self-taught in photography. “(British artist) David Hockney has been an influence as well as Jeff Wall,“ he says. He also likes to travel light. “I often don’t even use a tripod. Basically it’s a simple point-and-shoot method I use. This is particularly true with shots taken in a mall where you must be aware of being on private property.
Composites: “I will take anywhere from seven to 14 shots and scan them into the computer.“
Urban sprawl: “I am from the west—Harrison, Hot Springs, about 100 miles east of Vancouver—although I live mainly in Toronto.
“The past few years, I’ve been interested in the suburban sprawl taking over the landscape, particularly out west in small towns. There’s always that interesting kind of haunting contrast between business, the often destructive digging, the ugliness and the landscape.
Printing on watercolour paper: “I like the look of it, the feel of it. In some instances (the photographs) look more like a watercolour, particularly the landscapes…. I once tried printing on harder paper, but the contrast in colour, between light and dark was coming out too strongly for me.“
Alex Turner’s “scapes” ends today at Coop, 112 Scollard St., 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.