|
| Artist Intro |
"The Cape May Series" |
| Artist name / Photographer |
Bill Peronneau
|
This noted American photographer's first London exhibition showcases a powerful series of seascapes.
Bill Peronneau is a great American contemporary photographer who has made his home for many years in this country. The Special Photographers Company is very proud to be the first British gallery to represent this fine photographer, and to be able to introduce him to British audiences with one of the greatest series of seascapes ever made.
Cape May is the oldest resort town in America, situated on the New Jersey coast about 50 miles south of Atlantic City. It is where Abraham Lincoln took his holidays. It is also where Bill Peronneau's grandmother lived. Towards the end of her life, Bill visited her on a regular basis, knowing all along that he would be unlikely to come back, and wanting to take with him some part of his early life there. It took a full year to make this series of nine images, the whole of 1979, and they are rich beyond the imaginings of most photographers. Filled both with a strong attachment to the place itself, and with intangible overtones of memory and loss, this is a series that takes the poetic side of photography to its greatest possible heights.
Inevitably, Peronneau's seascapes will be compared to those of the great Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. It is worth noting that the Cape May Series was complete before Sugimoto made his first seascape, in Jamaica in 1980. The two bodies of work are formally similar, but the resemblance is not very profound. Where Sugimoto interests us in the thickness of the air above the sea, Peronneau has created a sea that is itself an element of our thinking. These views translate the shifting moods that the shore can evoke better than any pictures before. They are in reality more closely related to the great montaged sea-and-cloud views of the nineteenth-century French photographer Gustave le Gray than they are to Sugimoto's elemental compositions. Whichever line of descent one situates them in, there can be no doubt that Bill Peronneau's seascapes are in the very front rank of photographic achievements. These are great pictures by any standards.
|
|
