Ken Griffiths - THREE GORGES
Le 2008-01-19 02:59:33

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When Ken Griffiths’ exhibition ‘Three Gorges’ opens on 1st September 2005 at The Michael Hoppen Gallery, the world he has captured will have vanished under billions of cubic meters of water. Griffiths’ photographs of the Three Gorges Dam – China’s largest building project since the Great Wall, depict a lost landscape and the emergence of a new one, and evoke the imagery of traditional Chinese landscape painting. Each photograph is produced by the digital melding of a dozen images creating sweeping panoramic views that translate the restraint and meditative quality of Chinese art into the 21st century. Stepping into the world of cloud-enveloped mountains and misty gorges steeped in solitude, which for millennia have inspired Chinese poets and artists, Griffiths takes us on a journey towards both the monumental and the intricate. Only on closer inspection are the hidden details surrendered: the mountain and riverscapes, solitary and serene as they first seem, reveal the traces of civilisation: a lonely rice farmer who by now will no longer bring in his harvest, a hut with a satellite dish or a container ship laden with goods. Griffiths is fascinated by disappearing worlds and brings together his experience from documentary photography with his sensibility as an artist. Panoramic views – taken in October 2002 – show the majestic sublime Three Gorges before the dam was closed; the next set of photographs – taken in 2004 from the same viewing points – capture the new landscape a year after the Yangzi River had been dammed and risen by 141 meters. In 2009, when the Three Gorges Dam project will be completed, Griffiths will go again for his final photographs of man’s conquest of nature. Using a colour printing technique, which was invented in 1863 but disappeared in the 1950s, Griffiths’ images present the landscapes in a rare microscopic depth. Printed in many layers with pigments rather than dyes, this technique (carbro printing) allows Griffiths’ to intricately play with colour, contrast, sharpness and detail, endowing the work with a painterly quality impossible to achieve with modern printing methods. This process is still, ironically, the only totally permanent colour process to have been invented. Ken Griffiths has worked for more than three decades as a documentary photographer, most notably for the Sunday Times Magazine. In between his commercial assignments he has always pursued his artwork, which has included photographs of the demise of Smithfield meat market, Patagonia and the Abruzzo region in Italy – all portraying vanishing worlds. His work is in a number of important public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Wilson Centre for Photography in California. We strongly recommend face-to-face viewing of the ‘Three Gorges’ to appreciate depth and detail of both Griffiths’ work and the carbro printing technique. For further information please contact Eleanor Macnair on the details below.

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