Hunter of Beauty
Hunter of Beauty
Photographs by Grant Douglas
With an essay by Desmond Kelly
225 x 202mm, 148 pages, soft cover
ISBN 978-0-473-48140-7
Published by Grant Douglas, printed by Caxton Press, Christchurch, 2019
RRP $65.00
Purchase directly from publisher
"Some years ago Muka Gallery in Auckland showed some of my work. When I went up there for the opening, someone from the gallery asked me what I did for a living. I told them I was a gardener.
‘Oh, now it makes sense,’ they replied. That was one of the most understanding comments on my photography that I have ever received. I am a GARDENER and have been since a small child, and it has definitely shaped my way of seeing the world. Not only in the details, but also the aesthetics of patterns, systems and structures, and the essential being of things. I was once told the story of a photographer (film, not digital) who took numerous photographs and when the film was finished, he would throw it into a drawer and not get around to sending it away for processing. The quantity of undeveloped film grew and grew until one day he made a momentous decision. He stopped putting film in his camera, but kept using it. By doing this he retained the essential element of photography – seeing in a focussed manner. Unlike this photographer, I have never been a prolific taker or exhibitor of photographs. I once mentioned to Des Kelly that I had not taken any photographs for some time. His comment was that to grow as a photographer, it is not always essential to take lots of photographs but just to keep growing as a person. Economic constraints and the commitment to growing plants have contributed to my small output. They have also restricted my ability to travel and photograph in exotic places. So this has allowed me instead to concentrate my observation to the very close at hand, meaning that the common, the everyday, become exotic when focussed through the lens, where you can lose yourself in another world. I have always felt the need to share with others what I see, and how I interpret subject matter, hoping that it will inspire them to see the world in a different way".
Grant Douglas
HOLDING ETERNITY - Grant Douglas, photographer
Grant Douglas is a quiet man, not shy, but not loud either. He is a thinking man who has spent most of his life working by himself as a gardener. He began as a teacher but turned to gardening, a job in which he has been close to nature and where, like the poet Blake, he found so much to consider in the palm of his hand. He began photography in his very early twenties and it has been his major method of contemplating the world ever since. The pictures in this book are almost all from the natural history of the garden and that great zone of life where land meets the sea. On top of those he has found intrigue in man-made objects showing characteristics they were not designed for. His vision is shaped towards the small subject – it’s what he photographs – but his vision is not small, it is huge, because what he photographs is only the point of origin of what he thinks. Art is a production of three acts. Firstly, observation. There is no art without observation. Something catches the mind and will not let go. Secondly, art requires contemplation. What has been noticed is thought about, considered, and this is a crucial step because it imprints all the originality of the thinking artist.
Thirdly, what has been seen and processed internally, must then be expressed. Good artists produce work with their own individuality stamped all over it. To Grant Douglas the small is not only immediately to hand, it involves the whole natural world he likes to work in, and it causes him immense wonder. The images he shows here illustrate the small and intricate workings of natural design which so intrigue him. They also prove what a powerful observer he is. Like Blake’s ‘world in a grain of sand,’* his work has focus and intensity on the regularity and order nature uses. He is taken with the fact that in the beautiful repetition of design, nowhere are two patterns exactly the same. In what may look like repetition he finds similarity but also difference, as if nature having laid down the DNA of repetition still demands individuality. Amongst thousands of leaves on a tree, where each is formed by the same organising principle, no two are exactly the same. Nature demands likeness but abhors an exact copy. In his contemplation of the natural world, Grant shows that no matter how stringently repetition is demanded there is always a minor element of difference. It’s that which adds up over the millennia to give us great changes. There is a lesson here for mankind, a species which emphasises individuality to the point of stress – a species which finds it difficult to articulate and promote physical and social unity. Grant’s photographs say that minor variation, individuality, lies within the greater group. In a world where violence often intrudes, his photographs capture a patient and harmonious rhythm of life. Especially in the subtle use of tone and contrast and occasionally applied colour, he produces pictures of extreme delicacy which mystify the eye. They engage us, whether we are drawn in or choose to stand back.
Grant is a meticulous worker. He took his lessons from the examples of the great printmakers of the 20th century, photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Paul Caponigro. Technology has moved on and the work and skill he put into his silver prints he now uses to make digital images of great craftsmanship and artistry. We are used to photography which shows us the landscape and the cityscapes in which we live, which shows the portraits of the people we know and do not know, the famous and the infamous who illustrate our very lives. Grant has left all that to others; for him the natural and the very small are the subjects for his lens and his mind, and in the small, in the contemplation of introversion, he has opened up to us an awareness of similarity and difference, of individuality and universality that we tend to ignore. Grant has laid a hand on our shoulder and asks us to stop and look a little at what is around us, to wonder at it, to evaluate it, preserve it, and take it into our minds. In the 1920s and 30s Alfred Stieglitz, a great pioneer of modern photography, spent a decade photographing clouds. His idea was to prove that photography is a powerful medium able to stimulate the imagination independently of its subject matter. His series of cloud photographs, numbering more than 200, usually had no reference point to any orientation so that people looking at them were not cued in the usual manner to formalise and classify their thoughts. Faced with the nebulous clouds and no direction as to what they should, or might, think, they had to use their own minds and imaginations to engage with the pictures. People are not always comfortable in the face of such a challenge. Some are freed, some are frightened. Most like to be guided and have the comfort of knowing they are familiar with what they see in the image and can read it as most people do. But for those with eyes and open minds, the cloud pictures of Stieglitz were a revelation in photography. He settled on the name Equivalents as a generic title for the series and in that word he recognised both sides of the moon, in photography and in all art. What you see; what you see only in your mind. Photography is particularly powerful in the field of equivalents. That whole idea of using a photograph to make original and individual conversation between the photograph and the mind underlies Grant Douglas’s work. To him a photograph can be as original and as stimulating as a good book, a great film or the best music. All it requires is participation. In one of his shows a viewer looked at a photograph and said, ‘Billy Elliot’. Another said, ‘Stingray’ and both were looking at the same photograph of light reflected from plastic sheeting. Just as Stieglitz removed all orientation and reference points from his cloud photographs, so Grant chooses the same effect by using scale. In most of the pictures there is no indication of how big the object is, whether it is natural or man-made, or what condition it is in. It points to no political, social or industrial setting. It just is, of itself. Viewers have the choice of being repelled by it as too difficult, or of being engaged by it and having the image trigger all manner of pictures and thoughts within the mind. It is not surprising that the small is of concern to a gardener, for from it comes growth which fosters the important process of acute observation. It is one of the strange realities of the world, one that poets and philosophers have valued, that in the contemplation of the small lie big things. It is difficult to place Grant in the pantheon of New Zealand photographers. He is not politically, or socially, or historically concerned; he is not one who has caught the sharp, the bizarre or the spectacular, but in his desire to have us stop and look at the small things of existence he is both rare and important. It is his persistent application of a lifetime to photographing the small, and the recognition of its individual personality and beauty, which allows us to see that ‘world in a grain of sand’ and ‘hold infinity’* in the palm of our hands and it gives him a special and an important place in our artistic history.
Grant Douglas has walked a lonely path. May this volume help his work achieve the place it deserves in the nation’s photographic annals.
Desmond L. Kelly