Artist's Statement - Water, Stone, and Cloud
As I collected ideas over the past few years I decided that some had merit as photographs that need not be reinterpreted in any other way. Other images may have begun as photographs simply because the circumstances would not have allowed any other medium to collect the beginnings of an idea, but later I realized that something more was required for the image to succeed. For some images the cool quality of the surface of photographic paper was exactly what was needed to retain the magic of the moment. For others, the physicality of paint on canvas or the feel of charcoal on a sheet of rag paper had sensuous qualities that were an important part of the development of the idea.
I would also like to say something about the large-scale digital photographic prints in this exhibition. Again, with a high quality digital source, I found it was possible to significantly alter my relationship to the subject. Certainly large-scale photography has been around for sometime. For me it was simply that among the aspects of the landscape that I had been exploring, the issue of the water as a near abstraction was always an element in my thinking. In the major panorama in this exhibition, Three Studies of Lake Winnipeg, I moved the viewpoint only slightly within minutes of each photograph, producing a sense of shifting and dislocation with images that at first appear to connect but yet never quite align properly.
William Pura, June 2005
