THEME #13Winners2020JUL

LANDSCAPE

GRAND PRIX

DETAIL

Statement

The Dust & The Vein

The Dust and The Vein is an ongoing collection of photographs, centred around a single spoil heap 600 meters above sea level in the Fells of the English Lake District. The Large Format images are made only in Winter, often 12 months apart and only after hailstorms: the individual pellets of white hail and black slate-dust, paired with the lack of cloud detail throws perspective and removes a sense of scale. As Honister is an active slate mine, the spoil heap is never the same shape twice. With each tiny disturbance, the dust collapses and undergoes a complete metamorphosis.

Profile

Nicholas J R White

Nicholas J R White (born in Poole. Dorset, 1989) is a large format photographer based in Princetown on Dartmoor National Park, South West England. He works on long-term personal projects in addition to commercial and editorial assignments. His work examines the landscape and the ways in which we interact with our natural spaces.

Jury selection

Nicholas White’s eerie landscape almost looks like they are negatives at first, or even the moon. I admire his impeccable large format technique. The images have an austerity and a minimalism that makes you want to see them in real life. It reminds me of an engraving on a zinc plate, where the image is the ink of hundreds of thousands of little scratched lines. I also recall a master photographer, Harry Callahan, that I have learned so much from myself. His calligraphic black and white photos of reeds in a pond, riding that same line between natural form and abstraction.