“How we understand our landscape and our part in it … has a profound influence on how and what we remember and take from our landscape and how we glean meaning from newly encountered places[1].
Peter Ranyard’s work, River (2016), a selection of 28 images - shot on film and carefully manipulated in post-production, evoke a deep sense of longing and a nostalgia for a place we all hold close, but rarely get to. For some, it may only be an imagined place, for others it is a place of childhood adventures, or hiking trips with best friends or first loves, or perhaps places only consumed through novels and other’s descriptions. Ranyard allows us to hear the tumbling of the river, to feel the damp of the ferns as they brush against us and to venture into something only able to be experienced once. The poet, painter and art critic, John Berger, writes of photographs as having the ability to show us what was and what is all at once and Ranyard’s River embodies this, drawing us into the images to pause and imagine what the conditions were really like the moment the shutter was pressed and the image made - each image standing as witness to his experience of the wild, and now, as a record of a moment passed, leaving us yearning for our own journey as we wander from photograph to photograph.
Ranyard’s images reflect a manageable wilderness, a wild we can escape to, one we can tame just enough to gain an understanding of what lies beyond. They also present something exotic to most of us – something unseen and not yet experienced, giving us a glimpse of an environment that is ancient and all but untamed by permanent human inhabitation. The series creates a landscape of imagined memories, one where viewers can see themselves in the photographs, capturing the images and stirring up distant recollections of experiences possibly made into the wild – although we can’t be sure we made them. Through his mix of aerial, traditional landscape and detailed close up, each carefully composed and heavily manipulated to reveal just enough information, we can sense the rugged environment, the cool climate, the smell of earth and soil and decomposing foliage and overlay our own memories – real or otherwise - on his images. We are allowed to follow the journey Ranyard made over a number of years to Poronui, an area outside Taupo, New Zealand, almost as if at his side, feeling the isolation and emptiness of the plains, the denseness of the rainforests with the river serving as link to an outside world. Ranyard employs a deliberate use of dense, deep blacks, diffusion and grain to create distance from direct memory and experience – each manipulation serving as metaphor for our interaction with the environment, just as our memories are often romanticised and almost always selective of any experience.
For most of us, the reality of an adventure to an untouched place seldom matches our imaginations. However, Ranyard’s images create a space where we can revel in the joy of feeling small in the world, satisfying an urge to be elsewhere and to explore, matching our imaginations with reality. It goes without saying that the world has changed, just about anywhere in the world is accessible, however, in River, Ranyard reminds us that there are still pockets left untouched - stirring the environmentalist, the explorer and the romantic in us all to go on that journey, to follow that river, to venture into the unknown, to discover the exotic.
[1] Geraldine Mate, Memory: how people remember the landscape, accessed http://www.qhatlas.com.au/essay/memory-how-people-remember-landscape 31 August 2016.
Penelope Grist opening speech for River
Peter Ranyard’s River was edited down to 28 prints out of thousands of negatives – an extraordinary feat in itself, Peter presents Poronui, an area outside Taupo, New Zealand that runs into Maori lands and that he visited over a period of ten years for commercial work with the lodge there. When the lodge was sold a few years ago, a box of negatives arrived – with all his images of this remote, stunning, timeless place that he’d shot within and outside the brief!
What is so extraordinary about these images, a testament to the art of Peter’s rhythm in editing and hanging the show as much as his care with the contrast and soft grain, is that they are not gothic. Black and white images of isolated places, old sheds, forest, whispering grasslands – all the ingredients are there. But no – they are gentle, human, inhabited and uninhabited, respectful and welcoming. How could they not be, with the inclusion of characters like Flick, the lodge dog who just turned up one day and stayed. The other thing these works are not, is Lord of the Rings – they are not what is now recognised and has become almost a stereotype of the New Zealand landscape. They are just as beautiful but more complex, universal, poignant and, as Peter put it to me – ‘more like a place in your memory.’ Hardy Lohse writes that ‘Peter Ranyard’s images create a space where we can revel in the joy of feeling small in the world, satisfying an urge to be elsewhere and to explore, matching our imaginations with reality.’6
Great American photographer of black and white landscape, Ansel Adams said that ‘There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.’7
Peter Haynes Sydney Morning Herald
Peter Ranyard's River captures the beauty of a largely inaccessible part of New Zealand visited by the artist over a number of years. Ranyard is obviously deeply attracted to the sites pictured in the 28 photographs that comprise the exhibition. Each image is beautifully rich in topographical detail and this, aligned with a reverential awe for the power of the natural world, gives them powerful presence. Ranyard uses black in a particularly effective way. His blacks are dense and lush, redolent of a primeval past and of things no longer present. They are both colour and mood and act as purveyors of memory. The memories may initially be those of the artist and relate specifically to his chosen subject matter but it is a credit to him that viewers are invited (albeit extremely subtly) to move from his particular reveries to those of their own. Ranyard's evocative atmospheric landscapes clothed in his marvellous blacks are about memory and the power of the natural world to continually elicit responses from those who care to converse with it. They are about possibilities of loss, and about places once experienced but now remembered. They are also beautiful.
