Natural Fictions – Exhibition by Richard Freestone
Richard Freestone
LONDON, ENGLAND.-The Association of Photographers Gallery, London, presents Natural Fictions – Exhibition by photographer Richard Freestone, on view through November 12, 2005. Freestone explores the creative scope of cutting edge digital technology through beautifully tactile images of flora. The work on display in ‘Natural fictions’ has an elegant translucence that draws in the viewer and allows you to marvel at the beauty of nature. While, for Richard Freestone, this is a retrospective exhibition celebrating 15 years as a professional photographer, it is also a celebration of digital photography. Freestone’s more recent images form a growing body of work entitled ‘Natural Fictions’. With the subject matter primarily nature’s forms, abstracted to reveal graphic beauty, it was photographer (and Freestone’s old college tutor) John Blakemore who coined the fiction part of the title. Photographing flowers has always been a personal passion of Freestone’s, akin to Robert Mapplethorpe, who photographed flowers to clear his mind and prepare himself for photographing people. “I am particularly fascinated by tulips. The way their petals intensify in colour as they dry and shrivel. The sinuous curves of their stems as they droop.” Enthuses Richard. Richard Freestone is absorbed with digital photography – never before having had such image making facilities, saying “I can now put on paper what my imagination creates”. Hence the fiction series, which developed around a desire to produce images that are perfectly symmetrical.
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