As she starts, she takes you through a green field where an egret is relaxing on a back of a buffalo. She narrates you how that egret feels alone in that grassland and wants to talk to those buffaloes. But the buffaloes are busy grazing and do not want to be disturbed. The story follows the egret’s struggle to make friends. As she complete, you are just getting started. You ask for more. She tells you a few before you doze off with in your granny’s warm lap.
Well, we are quite a far away from those days.
But British photographer Zoe Childerley’s photos, being exhibited at the Siddhartha Art Gallery in Baber Mahal Revisited, takes us all back to the memory lane of fantastic childhood. One more time her photographs remind us of those cute little days in our lives when we loved to weave our dreams with fantasies and fiction. Childerley’s photos flip like the pages of those fairy tale books we went through as a child.
Her artistic pictures, many of them manipulated digitally, are creative outcomes of technical details and rigorous ingenuity. It’s a piece of art, in its literal terms. They are neat, technically sharp and are beautifully worked upon, making them look like a fairy tale series and yet they are strong, eye-catching and give various messages.
About photographer
Zoe Childerley is a British photographer. She holds a post-graduate degree in photography and works as a senior lecturer in De Montfort University. With ten years of experience in documentary photography, she has hosted eight solo photo-exhibitions in England and has been a part of 14 group shows at places like the United States, London, Northampton and Nottingham. She has also been involved in curation of exhibitions in public places like museums and galleries. She explores a lot of mix-media techniques, fusing photography with drawing, painting and digitizing them to project vibrant narratives and give them a complete new packaging.
Zoe Childerley is a British photographer. She holds a post-graduate degree in photography and works as a senior lecturer in De Montfort University. With ten years of experience in documentary photography, she has hosted eight solo photo-exhibitions in England and has been a part of 14 group shows at places like the United States, London, Northampton and Nottingham. She has also been involved in curation of exhibitions in public places like museums and galleries. She explores a lot of mix-media techniques, fusing photography with drawing, painting and digitizing them to project vibrant narratives and give them a complete new packaging.
Entitled “In a Different Light,” the major attraction of her pictures is the lighting that breathes life into them. This body of her work comprises a series of magical images which are delightfully familiar to our lives. The photos engage the lateral imagination of the photographer and inject heightened realities. Her compositions are governed by coherency that belongs to lonely space, unconscious feelings, tantalizing garden, dense foliage, wooden rafters and piles of luscious fruits. All these components follow a comfortable flow and demonstrate universality of story telling.
The dramatic digital manipulation goes hand-in-hand with the creator’s imagination. The photos depict a feeling that they are mostly based on fairy tales, folk tales, mythology and literature. Childerley has made a well attempt to show different beliefs in the society and has portrayed unity through a common motif. Full of eclecticism, her photos are powerful in detailing colors and subjects and they go deep into experiencing different faces of nature and the inhabitants it has within.
Childerley’s concern towards animals and her knack of getting deep into their feelings are widely evident on her pictures. At one point, she speaks about the ignorance and cruelty that we humans often do to animals, the next she goes on dwelling with the mystics and colors of the nature.
About the digitization of her pictures, they look well justified most of the times than others. But in some, they look slightly over done. When it comes to lighting, Childerley’s way of adjusting it varies from one photo to the other. In some of the pictures, lighting is carried out very carefully, without making it look quite artificial, but unnaturally acceptable. But in other, the halo of the brightness appears in the picture from nowhere, giving it a completely fake look. Take for example the picture that exposes a camel’s hump. When the entire background is dark and it looks deserted around, the bright yellow light focuses on the camel hump, very fictional, but very attractive whatsoever.
The most creatively edited picture on the exhibition has to be the one which is titled the “Swallow’s Nest.” This photo is more powerful than all the photos combined. The framing, composition, lighting and the meaning that it carries surely deserves a special mention. Likewise, her ability to capture the abundance of the beauty of nature in completely new POV (Point of View) is worth praising. In a nutshell, her photos have versatile abd lively approach to them and it exposes the wealth of experience and creative mind in Childerley, prompting many to invoke their own stories with the photos.
The exhibition that started on July 1 will run through July 18. Her creative outputs can be bought at Rs 15, 000 each.
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