GALLERY 2 + 3
STILL MOVING – NEW ZEALAND LANDSCAPES
VIRGINIA CUMMINS
This series of ‘empty film stills’ was shot around the North island of New Zealand. Inspired by black and white suspense movies and the creepy tonal grandeur of Leo White’s hand-coloured N.Z. landscapes, I set out to capture the feeling of a 1960s film set.
Here is a country where the magnificent natural landscape looms so large it refuses to simply stand as a background to the human story, rather it sets its own action and plays out its own heartbreakingly beautiful drama.
I took these photos during stolen moments such as times when my three small children slept in the back seat or as I worked my way along a narrow cliff track with a baby on my back. Half of the work was shot before dawn, while the rest of my family slept on. I felt powerfully alive in these quiet moments, spiritualized by the beautiful N.Z. landscape… and overjoyed, after so much stasis, to find that I was still moving.
As with much of my personal work, these photos were shot using lovely old medium format cameras from the ‘50s and ‘60s. For me these old cameras can almost recreate the era of their production. They also present the wonderful technical challenge to produce a striking image without the use of digital manipulations of the kind found in much contemporary photography… an image captured and resolved completely, in that one still moment.
