Hinterland

HIN TER LAND Photojournalism and Documentary Photography Catalogue Wednesday 25th February - Monday 2nd March The Gardens Gallery, Montpellier, Cheltenham Free Admission, open 11am - 6pm

Hinterland – A Documentary Perspective

This exhibition encompasses a wide-ranging selection of works from a variety of disciplines and interests. Within it are third year students from the Documentary Photography course at the University of Gloucestershire.

British cultural identity and history are often associated with its landscape. It is perhaps telling that our students have chosen to document the less noticeable and often neglected aspects contained within its shores.

Moreover, the current lived environment bares witness to the past and in the same manner that geological epochs have left their mark, man’s activity is omnipresent on the landscape too.

Unfettered human access is now a rare commodity in the West and it is unsurprising that photographers increasingly use the land as a metaphor to tell stories and construct narrative.

The exhibitions title equates to the land behind, the unseen and the overlooked, all of which still remain the traditional hunting ground for documentations and storytellers – the direct human presence is absent here, but the message remains the same.

Andy Moxon Senior Lecturer Dept of Photojournalism and Documentary Photography

Berry, Iona

Curle, Les

‘Subliminal Sublime’ deals with the expanse of visual language and messages in our surroundings. Advertising blurs the lines between fiction and reality, altering our physical environment. By removing these elements from the frame, the project aims to highlight how desensitised we have become to our consumerist society.

Les Curle is, by his own admission, living his life backwards. He left school at sixteen, took a masters degree in his early thirties and is now completing a bachelor’s degree in his late forties. His work concentrates on the social environment and after effects of the policies of successive governments. This current work focuses on the history of modern Gloucester, looking at the social changes in the past nine decades and the physical legacies of those changes in the human environment.

Dainton, Kate

Salisbury Plain rests over 300sq miles of Wiltshire’s ancient landscape.

With Stonehenge situated in its midst, as well as numerous Neolithic man-made sites on its chalk groundwork, it is a stunning evidence of natural history. Since 1898 it has been used by the military to train and operate armies through a century of world wars. Despite its first impression of a desolate, bare landscape, it has become a unique land of preservation for rare wildlife and species as a by-product of the militaries protection and is truly one of the most captivating, historical spaces in the UK.

Dosell, Abbie

De-industrialisation in Britain has rendered many of the most productive and powerful landscapes of the century inept. This series explores the once thriving industrial sectors of the West Midlands now that there is no longer a use for them within modern society and they have been left to fall into a state of disrepair. This is not a melancholy depiction of a land now forgotten, but a nod to the proud history of the landscapes of the industrial heart of the West Midlands.

Kennaway, Olivia

King, Jordan

‘Transience’ alludes to the fragility and temporary existence of human presence on the landscape and the environment’s ability to endure as a constant fabric upon the earth’s surface. As generations come and go, people mould the land to suit their needs and create their own stories upon it, only for them to become a distant memory and later an archival piece of history.

The project Kettering Road explores the houses on a single street within Northamptonshire. Within the same postcode there is a huge diversity in the style and structure of each section of the road. This adaptation signifies the greater changes within British Society, and highlights the expansion and divergence that architecture has had throughout history.

Pitchers, Conor

as the past of revolution it journeys with the dust exploring a constant birth w​hen bathed in tender light harmony illuminates the soul of dreams allowing one to balance on the reflection of mother ocean understanding trivialities as one and undivided

Reed-Mumford, Ellie

Mining of China clay is the largest industry in Cornwall, as well as affecting the economy; it has also greatly shaped the landscape. Large peaks and deep pits are created from the mining, dramatically changing the appearance of the land. These peaks nicknamed ‘The Cornish Alps’ can be seen from miles around, this collection of photographs shows the effects this industry is having on the landscape and environment.

Roberts, Ellie

Ryan, Philip

This is the documentation of the Crowle Moors peat bogs. A landscape of entropic, carbon decay. Crowle, together with Hatfield, Thorne and Goole, form the largest complex of lowland raised bog in Britain. Peat has been taken and cut from the land for hundreds of years, initially by locals as fuel for fires. This gives the land a level of evolution. Evolving and shaping history, in contrast to the 21st century, a devolving decay.

This series aims to highlight man’s interference with the land in contrast to the neglect, returning the land to a vegetative state finding beauty in stark landscapes

‘The Ridgeway’, a National Trail in southern England is Europe’s oldest road, dating back to the last Ice Age when the chalk ridge functioned as a long distance trading route. It contrasts the historical and contemporary using visual and physical metaphors, questioning our perceptions of it and exploring such issues as the tensions arising from a growing population and expanding city increasing demands for housing, transport links and infrastructure in a global free market economy.

Simmonds, Craig

Contact Details Online catalogue: https://wearepjd.wordpress.com Berry, Iona: 07576714076 Curle, Les: 07500650993 Dainton, Kate: 07966374328 Dosell, Abbie: 07870324913 Kennaway, Olivia: 07817236703 King, Jordan: 07951948511 Pitchers, Conor: 07958198129 Reed-Mumford, Ellie: 07895420720 Roberts, Ellie: 07470683453

‘New Town, No More’ focuses on the New Town of Crawley; an English borough built on an ideal of functionality and necessity in the 1950’s.

Over time this suburb has adapted to meet the demands of modern living. Rigorous manufacture and elapsed time have caused Crawley to appear untidy and dilapidated. Yet, by arranging the scenes proficiently within the frame of the camera, their context is altered. An artifice, symmetry and hybridity is uncovered - aspects inherent to the landscape but regularly unnoticed.

Ryan, Philip: 07972684899 Simmonds, Craig: 07960049501