Happy After Ever

Happy After Ever is a series of large format photographs seeking to reaffirm the lasting power of the photographic image. It continues my interpretive response to the work of the Dutch Masters, but enlists landscape elements to further my investigation of notions of permanence within contemporary digital photography. I travelled to Iceland with my daughter in 2019 to shoot this work and was interested in placing a lone figure in the inhospitable, fragile Icelandic environment that is threatened by erasure; to capture the precarious nature of the landscape, and comment on it's fragility versus the potential decay of the modern digital photograph. Contemporary photography's digital expression risks its legacy as lasting cultural artefact due to the ubiquity of image making becoming the enemy of quality and the recording of history. Shooting with an IPhone and Drone I question the archival uncertainty and impermanence of the digital image in a threatened landscape.