LIKE a moth, American photographer Richard Ross is drawn to light.
Indeed, he has spent the past ten years working on a series of photographs devoted to this theme, and more specifically to the way light falls on objects.
You may recall another Impressions exhibition earlier this year, Translucent Exposures.
Artist, water biologist and environmentalist Annie Halliday "explored the relationship between light and light's absence" in a series of photograms in which images were produced through the use of light, an object such as a bottle or a car window and light-sensitive objects: ice, water and the like. Light was refracted, reflected and filtered through the object and the result was haunting, mysterious, impenetrable and fragile yet very scientific too.
No such artifice goes into the work of Richard Ross: he does not use or abuse light so much as present it how it presents itself to him on his travels throughout the world (on assorted assignments for magazines). He selects generally unpopulated scenes, such as ancient tombs, discovered treasures from museum basements, ruined Roman baths and abandoned monasteries.
Ross is magnetised by the presence of light in these places of quietude.
"Found" lighting, whether natural or artificial, the sun's rays or a strip light, is then captured by Ross's camera, as if the light were sitting for a portrait, and he then assembles a portrait gallery of these images of light in its myriad forms, strong, weak, bright, wan.
Gathering Light is the most peaceful of exhibitions: as you walk around the two gallery floors bathed in light, it is like being surrounded by candles in a Roman Catholic church or standing in Hollywood's idea of heaven's waiting room. There is, too, a feeling of warmth to match a womb, and certainly Gathering Light is a place where you can feel very comfortable - whereas elsewhere light can be employed for the purposes of interrogation and torture.
Three thoughts come to mind.
Firstly, it is a bonus to see this exhibition on a sunny day, the sun added its own lighting to the exhibition.
Secondly, not one of Ross's images of light was photographed in Britain; that may be a coincidence but perhaps it is a comment on our grey, drab canvas of colour.
Thirdly, in so much photography the artificial light source of flashlights are a key factor; what a pleasure it is to find a photographer who lets light tell its own story.
In Gathering Light, Richard Ross succeeds in shedding a new light on light itself.
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