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Shifting Landscape

Visual Art & Photography

via Scotland and Aotearoa New Zealand

Alba Dubh

Black-and-white landscape photograph of a snow-dusted mountain in Glen Alladale, lit by a pale shaft of light against a near-black sky, with small trees in deep shadow at its base
Winter Snows, Glen Alladale
(1:34pm Friday 31st December 2004)

Alba Dubh (Dark Scotland) is a series of dark black-and-white Scottish landscape photographs made from source images mostly taken between 2004 and 2006, then later reworked after moving to Aotearoa New Zealand. The works return to Scotland through mountains, lochs, islands, coastlines, forests, roads, cloud and changing light.

Dark tonal reworking draws out atmosphere, weight and instability in the landscape. Cloud presses down, light breaks through, water catches brief illumination, hills recede into shadow, and landforms appear both solid and uncertain. The black-and-white treatment does not simply make the images older or more dramatic. It allows the photographs to sit somewhere between record, memory and return.

Many of the photographs began in direct experience of the land: hillwalking, travelling, looking across water, moving through weather, or stopping at the edge of a road, path or ridge. The date and time held in many titles keep each image attached to a specific encounter, even as later reworking opens it again from a different distance. Alba Dubh is shaped by this tension between lived land and altered memory: Scotland as remembered place, weathered image and darkened return.

  • Black-and-white landscape photograph of Ben Nevis beyond part of the Aonach Eagach ridge of Glencoe in silhouette, with the snow-patched summit faintly lit against a near-black sky.
    Dark Nevis, Lochaber
    (7:28pm Thursday 21st April 2005)

  • Near-black black-and-white landscape of Loch Lomond, with dark wooded foreground, low silhouetted islands, faint water bands and distant hills receding into mist beneath a heavy dark sky.
    Misty Darkness I, Loch Lomond
    (12:48pm Saturday 2nd April 2005)
  • Black-and-white landscape photograph at Loch Etive, with two brightly lit snow-covered peaks against a dark sky, a still loch in the middle ground, and a large rounded boulder in the foreground.
    Snowblind, Loch Etive
    (9:56am Thursday 17th February 2005)
  • Black-and-white landscape photograph across Lochan na h-Achlaise, with ice-patterned shallows, winter shrubs, boulders, still water, reflected trees and snow-covered Blackmount peaks beyond.
    Frozen Landscape, Blackmount
    (10:43am Sunday 19th February 2006)

  • Dark black-and-white landscape on Rannoch Moor, with two large snow-covered mountain flanks opening toward a pale glowing gap in the cloud, and a small reflective pool low in the shadowed moorland below.
    Cloud Gap, Rannoch Moor
    (3:37pm Sunday 19th February 2006)

  • Black-and-white landscape with silhouetted Scots pines on a dark hillside, a snow-covered mountain slope catching light behind them, and a near-black sky filling most of the frame.
    Caledonian Pines, Crianlarich
    (4:23pm Sunday 19th February 2006)

  • Black-and-white long exposure landscape photograph of the River Etive in Glen Etive, with rounded granite boulders set in smooth pale water, dark woodland and a mountain face beyond.
    Silver River, Glen Etive
    (7:49pm Saturday 25th June 2005)

• LANDSCAPE •