Ryan Ponsford is a multifaceted photographer, with a minimalist aesthetic, technical skills and experimental approach to photography. As part of his exhibitions in AT_SALON
2 Ponsford showcased two distinct but equally dynamic series of photographs.
Ponsfords series
Birds works with a combination of museum specimens and found objects to create images that are an amalgamation of the ideas of the 19th century Vanitas painters and the clean, cold aesthetics of 60’s minimalism. The work captures the tension between preservation and degradation, life, death and the irreversibility of natural processes.
His most recent series
Ocean is a series of wet plate collodion positives, depicting objects and remains that washed up on the beaches of his adolescence. Part photography, part performance,
Ocean reflects on at environmental encounter as artwork that an encounter with the environment can be the art itself and haptics in process. Rain and sea mist can violently disrupt the photograph and sand and insects embed in the surface of the sticky, liquid emulsion.
Ocean looks at landscape. Not the idealised images that landscape is commonly depicted as, but a vignette, like a memory, created in the intertidal zone, a place of constant flux, a metaphor for change and for time, something photography itself is inherently bound to.