PETER HOWE

THE RESTLESS PLANET: EARTH'S MANY MOODS | WEST GALLERY | SEPTEMBER 29 - NOVEMBER 5, 2016

During my career in photography people were usually the subjects of both the pictures I shot as a photographer and published as an editor. Several years ago I had a Traumatic brain injury and found I was no longer able to function as an author, something I had been doing for about a decade. This brought me back to taking photographs, and I became fascinated by the idea of unpopulated landscapes. Instead of photographing the inhabitants of earth I concentrated on the planet itself. This is the land as it may have been before we crawled out of the sea, and as it may be when the last humans leaves. One thing I quickly learned was that the earth is both eternal and ever-changing. Standing in the same spot the landscapes will alter dramatically for as long as you observe it – light changes, weather changes, the seasons change. We falsely assign human emotions to these changes describing one area as harsh and forbidding, another as welcoming, when what we’re really saying is, this is how we emotionally react to our environment. A feature of this change process in which I’m becoming increasingly interested is human ruins, If you look at the destroyed temples around Ankor Wat in Cambodia you witness the power of the jungle over human pride and industry, a process I find very moving. My next photographic project will concentrate on ruins, the evidence of our constant endeavor and its vulnerability to the power of nature.

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