For me, certain places resonate - particularly wild or bucolic places where human presence, if found at all, seems distinctly secondary. Or places of ruins or other echoes of a human presence now vanished. To my sensibility at least, the emotional resonances of these places are like variations on a theme - a theme, however, that resists verbal understanding and can only be discerned in other ways, especially, though not necessarily, through a photographic lens.
Photography bears direct witness to its subject matter. This creates a kind of intimacy between subject and image that gives photography a unique voice with which to speak to, among other things, the subjective, emotional aspects of places. This visual "voice" has the capacity to reconstruct places in our imagination with a heightened sense of evocativeness (which I try to achieve by exploring and starkly presenting certain formal elements of the image). If this can be done without disturbing the essential photographic intimacy of the image, we are able to see through that image discover in the places themselves a new emotional truth, however ineffable it may be.
Peter Axilrod has been photographing landscapes all over the world for many years, focusing on places that are removed to one degree or another from modern daily life - places that generally have more to do with nature, myth or the past. His images have been exhibited in New York City, Durham North Carolina and Lyme Connecticut. His interest in using photography to express feelings about these kinds of places began with backpacking and trekking through the Chinese Karakoram and arctic Alaska (color images of which were exhibited in New York City but are not included in this website). Since then his photographic explorations have ranged from the ice and water wilds of Tierra del Fuego to the Arabian fringes of Ancient Rome; from the sacred Buddhist mountain Namsan near the Southern tip of Korea to the remans of Homer's Troy on the Aegean coast; and from the forested ruins of the Khmer empire in Cambodia to the remains of the Mayan civilization hidden in the jungles of Belize; as well as to myriad places in between. Samples of black and white images from these places are shown in this website's gallery.
The silver gelatin prints of my photographs were generally made directly from medium format black and white film negatives in a collaborative process between photographer and printer. Some were made from contact negatives derived from digital images using a similar collaborative process (these are noted separately). Except where otherwise noted, the black and white images exhibited in this website are JPEGs derived from higher density digital scans of the original silver gelatin prints and cannot fully convey the originals' resolution or tonal qualities. Where noted, some black and white images presented in this website are pure digital images, but silver prints may be made from contact negatives derived from them.
Lyme Public Library
482 Hamburg Road, Lyme CT, 06371
Connecticut River Tidewater
Silver Gelatin Prints
July 20 - September 20
Opening Reception - Thursday July 27 at 6 pm
Bull City Ballroom
4015 University Drive, Suite K, Durham, NC 27707
Permanent exhibit showing a selection from the silver gelatin prints imaged on this website as well as selections of color C-Print images of the Chinese Karakoram and arctic Alaska from prior exhibitions
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