ALEX TURNER

ARTICLE | The Agassiz-Harrison Observer

Widescreen wilderness

Submitted for your approval, the time and space pending images of photographer, Alex Turner

By James Baxter

August 27, 2002

There’s something strange about Alex Turner‘s photographs.

The landscape in his pictures have a surreal quality, distorted and stretched like warm taffy.

In one long, narrow photo, Harrison Lake’s lagoon is pulled tightly into a wide grin, surrounded by a thin sliver of shoreline that extends from one end of the frame to the other.

It’s weird; like looking at an alien beach, surrounded in a sci-fi time warp. Everything seems out of proportion, like continents spread across an atlas page.

It doesn’t help that there are two Harrison resort hotels at each end of the picture, staring at one another from across the lake.

It’s strange, alright.

Turner’s panoramic photography literally stretches the bounds of his craft; offering space-bending images that span 180 or even 360 degrees. The Harrison-raised photographer/artist says his unique take on the villages waterfront and on other environments stems from his fascination with sequence, specifically with capturing the elements of time and space in his work.

If it sounds a little like a Jim Morrison poem, don’t worry, because the results can be regarded as cool works of art, not just scrutinized for a deeper meeting.

Turner, who splits his time between a childhood house on Lillooet and a Toronto apartment, explains he has no formal photographic training, but sort of picked up the hobby in the mid ’70s. It was at about the same time that he began to re-examine his surroundings.

“I think it was trying to create my own world and I didn’t find a single image enough, so I started building on that,“ says Turner, who taught art courses in the Ontario capital for several years.

“The most natural thing for me, was to take a shot, move the camera, overlap it a little bit, take another, take another, and so on.

“Then I thought, ‘why not go around in a circle,’ so I put it on a tripod and started doing that.“

What Turner discovered was “circular“ photography, the art of taking overlapping snapshots in succession, while turning around a stationary-mounted camera.

When the developed photos were combined and their seams retouched, you had a landscape of buildings, forests, beaches or parking lots that appeared to defy nature.

His first major panorama work was his interpretation of a Toronto urban park. (Four Seasons, Allen Gardens.) His series captured the green space as it progressed through the seasons. Despite being black and white, Turner lauds it as some of his most elaborate work. After shooting in a horizontal circle, he aimed his camera skyward and added a vertical element to create what he calls “an entire scene.”

Turner’s family arrived in Harrison when he was twelve, and the youngster soon realize two things: he wanted to be an artist and he wanted to get out and see the world.

Fresh out of Vancouver Art School, he laboured in a design studio before realizing it was not what he wanted to do.

He joined an aunt in Toronto soon after, in 1975.

“It just opened your eyes,“ he notes. “For most people who grow up in a small town, you want to get out and see the world.

“I liked being able to walk down a city street and not know anybody—I loved the anonymity of it.“

Turner began teaching in a large technical college, instructing in a range of mediums, including video. It was there that a borrowed camera first exposed him to the wonder of photography.

He taught himself to use the darkroom and was soon clipping contact sheet images, lining them up and realizing how people in the frames were captured, one movement at a time, sequentially as on a movie film strip.

“Then I became interested in the passage of time,“ he says.

Another of Turner’s interest is the relationship between the natural environment and what he calls the “built environment.“

“There is a surreality to the shopping mall, particularly the large shopping mall,“ he says. “I sometimes wonder if beings from another planet came down and took a look at those, what they would think of us.“

He complains that when the mall is built or a building “plopped” in the middle of the street, there is often no thought into what goes next to it. The result, he explains, is saddening.

“What I see, particularly in the Fraser Valley, are so many communities ringed by shopping malls where the lifeblood of the core or the original community has been sucked out.”

It’s age-old attempt to impose on nature, to dominate nature instead of working with it, he adds.

Like all artists, Turner has a drawn from his observations and will be displaying a thematic exhibit on that very subject in Chilliwack. Typically bleak box store parking lots become even more barren-looking in one of Turner‘s panoramas. His landscapes of asphalt and busy roads provide an unnerving glimpse at the ugly side of urbanization.

Another panorama also taken in Chilliwack, overlooks an overpass where speeding cars, trapped in Turner’s Sterling-esque sights, seem to vanish into another dimension—one end visible, the other vaporized.

“It looks like chaos,“ Turner explains, “but there is an order to it. As an artist, you are always seeking order out of chaos, manipulating pattern and form, colour in space.“

Now, back in Harrison, Turner‘s work is being featured next month at the Ranger Station Art Gallery. All of the panorama‘s were taken locally, showcasing not only the beach, but also various famous streets, landmarks and wooded areas.

Like his photos that pit nature against mindless architecture, Turner is a man of contrast. He loves the bustle of downtown streets, but hates suburbia. He couldn’t wait to experience the busy world, yet now splits Toronto life with gentler Harrison—the subject of some of his most exciting photographs.

“Harrison’s a real draw for anyone,” he suggests “it’s so damn beautiful.”