Dominic Pote
Dominic Pote paints with light. His materials may be those of the photographer but his eye is that of an expressionist painter and his sensibility one of a poet.
His camera is held in line with his body, becoming an extension of movement rather than observation. Often he works without looking through the viewfinder, beginning on his knees or moving through the landscape to discover a particular perspective. Existing somewhere between the filmmaker and the still photographer, his exposures continue for as long as he walks. Many of his photographs extend to two or three metres in length, their physical scale echoing the journeys that created them. Framed by the act of walking, each work becomes both a literal and metaphorical passage through space, retaining the organic rhythm of its making.
Whether photographing the shifting volcanic shoreline of Milos or the iconic architecture of London, Pote explores the thresholds between permanence and change, presence and absence. His frontiers are both physical places and imagined territories. Echoing the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, where sea, sky and land become sites of contemplation, Pote's work reveals the underlying spiritual significance of place. His photographs invite us into the space between movement and stillness, between the visible and the invisible, between time and eternity.
Henri Cartier-Bresson spoke of the photograph's "decisive moment"—that potent instant suspended forever within a single frame. Pote, however, creates images that evoke not a single moment but the experience of time itself. Working without the aid of digital manipulation, his photographs are hazy, dreamlike and immersive, recalling the fluid nature of memory rather than the fixed certainty of documentation.
His subjects are seascapes, architecture and landscape, drawn to the places where worlds converge: the city and the skyline, the shoreline and the sea. Movement, flux and transformation lie at the heart of both his aesthetic and philosophical concerns. Light dissolves boundaries, bleaching away detail until sky, water and buildings merge into one another, creating images in which place becomes both tangible and imagined.
“Dominic Pote paints with light. His materials may be those of the photographer but his eye is that of an expressionist painter and his sensibility one of a poet. Cartier-Bresson talked of the photograph’s ‘decisive moment’, that potent instant frozen forever within a single frame. But Pote, without the aid of a digital camera or other technological devises, creates images that suggest the actual experience of time. Hazy and dreamlike his photographs imitate the process of memory itself. His subjects are seascapes, architecture and landscape for he is attracted to the point where places meet; the city and the skyline, the shoreline and the sea.”
- Sue Hubbard (an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic who writes regularly for The Independent and The New Statesman)
