David Burdeny is an architect who seems to be making a big name for himself as a fine art photographer. A Landscape photographer, David’s images have an amazing calmness about them.
David Burdeny is a Canadian photographer of the landscape. Whilst he shoots BW film, he exhibits and sells C-type color prints of these because he finds it works better for his preferred mounting method on aluminum.
Preferring to shoot in low light and twilight, David’s exposures are long. With his preferred subject matter of sea, sky and the land in between, the long exposures produce a beautiful abstraction, blurring the movement of both sky and sea. The resulting images are striking. The work is displayed in four galleries: Asia, Europe, North America and Color Work. The three galleries of BW work all share a common approach: long exposure blurring of the water and sky, forming a strong textural contrast with the sharp manmade or landscape elements. The color work is very different, forming a series called ‘Drift’. These use a variety of analog and digital photographic processes to reverse the normal way a camera records motion. Rather than blurring movement and sharply recording the still, these images of David’s blur the still and render sharp that which is in motion.
The website uses Flash but it does this in an absolutely perfect way. The site is very fast and responsive and has none of the problems some Flash sites do with sluggishness. Each page has an identical layout. There is a top and a bottom menu. The top menu provides links to display CV, Artist Statement, Print Info, Representative, News, Reviews and Contact info. The bottom menu gives access to the four galleries of work, images of David’s first book and images of the magazine articles that have appeared about his work. When you access a gallery, a row of numbers appears below the bottom menu that provide access to the individual images, a tasteful animation effect scrolls in the new image. My one criticism is that you need a wide browser window to see the whole width of the page. If your window width just happens to fall at the right place you may not realize you are not seeing all of the page, because no horizontal scrollbar appears. This is a problem and I’d like to see it addressed. A wide browser window is needed sometimes, however, because some of the images are somewhat panoramic.
David’s work is strikingly minimalist. I love it. The BW work is graphic, in that there is strong use of shape, line and tone. It is, above all else, beautiful. The images are clean and grain free (hard to see on the web but if you see one of the magazines that has covered his work or have one of the galleries that represent him nearby, you will see this. The ‘Drift’ series of color work is amazingly. Abstract paintings with light is how I would describe them.
You can learn a lot from examining David’s work. They can teach you about composition, about the use of tone and about how to say more with less. David’s book, Shorelines, certainly looks worth adding to a photo book collection. David’s work certainly inspires me.
