Photographer Nigel Parry has been lauded over his 35-year career for his portrait photography of US presidents, celebrities and other luminaries — Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian and Leonardo DiCaprio, to name a few — for publications like Vogue, The New York Times Magazine and Time Magazine.
But he’s showing another side of his artistic voice in Untitled Places, an exhibition at the City Gallery at Waterfront Park which assembles abstract, liminal landscapes by Parry. The exhibition opened on March 1 and will remain on view through May 5. There’s a chance to meet Parry at his artist talk at 2 p.m. March 16.
Untitled Places showcases more than forty of Parry’s impressionistic landscapes. About half of the photographic works were made in the Lowcountry, Parry said — four of them in fact capture the Waterfront park where the gallery is located. Some abstract a foggy Colonial Lake into a kaleidoscopic exploration of color, while other photos capture bright white light on Spanish Moss. The other half of the works were made in upstate New York, with a handful made while traveling between New York, his new home in Charleston, and his native South Yorkshire, England.
Parry said that this show is a return to an interest he’s had since he first picked up the camera. “From the age of 11 to 22, it was all landscapes,” he said in an interview. But when he found mega success in portraiture, he remained on near constant assignment for three decades — that is, until the COVID lockdown left him without subjects to photograph.
“I realized I missed organizing elements in a frame … I had to go and dig around in my studio to find my old film camera, which I hadn’t used since I switched to digital in 2006.”
A change of subject matter
He returned to photographing the landscape on 35 mm film, a hobby he enjoyed when he was young. Parry sometimes employs long exposure times to create blurry, fuzzy, grainy photographs. He emphasized the fact that shooting on film is what creates the intriguing textures and atmospheres on display in Untitled Places. “Their inherent imperfections — lens aberrations, grain within the film’s various layers, chemical development … it all comes together to transform the photographs into something more abstract.”
A handful of smaller works in the show are actually shot on iPhone, of Parry’s freezing breath illuminated by a flashlight as he walked his dog through the snow in New York.
“My landscapes use all the same means of visual storytelling and intentions to show my highly personalized representation of the environment around me. These photographs are not necessarily meant to be a direct representation of the view I see, but more of a feeling of what it’s like to be there.”
When he made the first works in the series, he said, Parry found a resemblance to the colorblocked, spiritually charged paintings of Mark Rothko. “Unwittingly, I was being influenced by Rothko somewhere along the line,” adding that the Rothko reference became the throughline that unites Untitled Places. “I got completely hooked on dividing the frame.”
Some of the works appear at faraway glance as a block of purple above a block of green. But upon closer inspection, you’ll slowly uncover a horizon line with tiny, blurry trees; a ripple in the water; or the wind-blown, blurry blades of grass in the marsh. In some cases, you might find a tiny person captured on film — Parry’s sense of scale in these 40×40-inch photographs reminds his viewers of the overwhelming, mystical power of nature.
“The only difference between these and portrait photography is no one’s telling me who to go and photograph,” he told the City Paper. “But I approach it with the same thoughts: What’s the message I’m trying to say? How am I going to say that? Sometimes the message isn’t sort of metaphysical or mystical … It’s, ‘F***ing hell. Look at those clouds.’ ”
Beauty in the mundane
Though the photos in Untitled Places handle a different subject matter than the portraiture he’s known for, his handling of those two subjects are the same, he said.
“As a portrait photographer, you’re in an exceedingly privileged position where you are asked by someone to make a highly personalized comment about the person that’s in front of you. That’s really what a portrait photographer is — giving your opinion of someone using light, expression, direction that they’re looking, composition. You’re getting a feeling for the person, and you’re trying to put that down so that the viewer of the photograph gets an immediate message.”
And that’s what he’s describing in his landscapes too; the feeling of a place, the atmosphere as he stood in front of the camera, the thoughts that floated through his mind as he observed the world through a viewfinder.
“There’s an awful lot of beauty to be found in the mundane.”
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