My OperaAshes and Snow- Feather to Fire : Gregory Colbert
Tuesday, March 4, 2008 3:01:18 PM
Thank God there are still artists like this in the world!
Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1960, Gregory Colbert began his career in Paris in 1983 making documentary films on social issues. Filmmaking led to fine arts photography. His first exhibition, Timewaves, opened in 1992 at the Museum of Elysée in Switzerland.
For the next ten years, Colbert did not exhibit his art or show any films. Instead, he traveled to such places as India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Dominica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tonga, Namibia, and Antarctica to film and photograph wondrous interactions between human beings and animals. Since 1992, he has launched more than forty such expeditions. Elephants, whales, manatees, sacred ibis, Antigone cranes, royal eagles, gyr falcons, rhinoceros hornbills, cheetahs, leopards, African wild dogs, caracals, baboons, elands, meerkats, gibbons, orangutans, and saltwater crocodiles are among the animals he has photographed. Human subjects include Burmese monks, trance dancers, San people, and Colbert himself free diving with whales.
In 2002, Colbert presented the culmination of his singular work, Ashes and Snow, at the Arsenale in Venice, a twelfth-century shipyard. It was the largest solo exhibition ever mounted in Italy. In spring 2005 the show opened on the Hudson River Park's Pier 54 in New York City in the first-ever Nomadic Museum. The exhibition and the museum have since migrated to Santa Monica, California, Tokyo, and Mexico City.
Ashes and Snow has no final destination, and many new species will be added as the project evolves. Each exhibition is simply a port of call.
Every one of Gregory Colbert’s photographs captures a moment that happened.
The cynical eye is trained to assume trickery in images such as these, is resistant to the idea that they could represent the actual and the possible, but these images owe nothing to Photoshop, photo manipulation, montage, artificial lighting, or special effects.
He has taken the medium of the instantaneous and turned it into something slow, expansive, epic. You could be looking at a moment that occurred yesterday, or three hundred years ago. The effect is uncanny. You feel as if you are in the presence of a dream, a myth, a fairy tale.
When Colbert travels they occupy their own seat next to him on the plane. The collection is the result of an ongoing ten-year long project, of which these pictures form a small sample.
“I’m interested in exploring intemporal wonders, so there is no urgency. Five years, ten, fifteen, it wouldn’t have made a difference, because what was being made was completely outside of time.” The project consisted of 25 expeditions to around the world, to document the interaction between animals and humans, to India to photograph the elephants that are his first love, to Sri Lanka, South Africa, Egypt, and the oceans off the Azores.
“We live in species ghettoes. There used to be a diversity of species in places we lived, whereas now, we have very little interaction with other species. When we’re young there’s not that sense of being isolated from other species. Young children are able to speak with animals, and then they get banished.”
The images are born of Colbert’s unique method, and the time and space he has been allowed by his patrons, what he calls his “guardian elephants”.
“I wanted to use my whole heart, in a whole way, in a whole direction. Some people find that radical thinking, but in other periods of history it was a given.”
I wanted to use my whole heart...
Born in Toronto, Canada, in 1960, Gregory Colbert began his career in Paris in 1983 making documentary films on social issues. Filmmaking led to fine arts photography. His first exhibition, Timewaves, opened in 1992 at the Museum of Elysée in Switzerland.
For the next ten years, Colbert did not exhibit his art or show any films. Instead, he traveled to such places as India, Burma, Sri Lanka, Egypt, Dominica, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tonga, Namibia, and Antarctica to film and photograph wondrous interactions between human beings and animals. Since 1992, he has launched more than forty such expeditions. Elephants, whales, manatees, sacred ibis, Antigone cranes, royal eagles, gyr falcons, rhinoceros hornbills, cheetahs, leopards, African wild dogs, caracals, baboons, elands, meerkats, gibbons, orangutans, and saltwater crocodiles are among the animals he has photographed. Human subjects include Burmese monks, trance dancers, San people, and Colbert himself free diving with whales.
In 2002, Colbert presented the culmination of his singular work, Ashes and Snow, at the Arsenale in Venice, a twelfth-century shipyard. It was the largest solo exhibition ever mounted in Italy. In spring 2005 the show opened on the Hudson River Park's Pier 54 in New York City in the first-ever Nomadic Museum. The exhibition and the museum have since migrated to Santa Monica, California, Tokyo, and Mexico City.
Ashes and Snow has no final destination, and many new species will be added as the project evolves. Each exhibition is simply a port of call.
Every one of Gregory Colbert’s photographs captures a moment that happened.
The cynical eye is trained to assume trickery in images such as these, is resistant to the idea that they could represent the actual and the possible, but these images owe nothing to Photoshop, photo manipulation, montage, artificial lighting, or special effects.
He has taken the medium of the instantaneous and turned it into something slow, expansive, epic. You could be looking at a moment that occurred yesterday, or three hundred years ago. The effect is uncanny. You feel as if you are in the presence of a dream, a myth, a fairy tale.
When Colbert travels they occupy their own seat next to him on the plane. The collection is the result of an ongoing ten-year long project, of which these pictures form a small sample.
“I’m interested in exploring intemporal wonders, so there is no urgency. Five years, ten, fifteen, it wouldn’t have made a difference, because what was being made was completely outside of time.” The project consisted of 25 expeditions to around the world, to document the interaction between animals and humans, to India to photograph the elephants that are his first love, to Sri Lanka, South Africa, Egypt, and the oceans off the Azores.
“We live in species ghettoes. There used to be a diversity of species in places we lived, whereas now, we have very little interaction with other species. When we’re young there’s not that sense of being isolated from other species. Young children are able to speak with animals, and then they get banished.”
The images are born of Colbert’s unique method, and the time and space he has been allowed by his patrons, what he calls his “guardian elephants”.
“I wanted to use my whole heart, in a whole way, in a whole direction. Some people find that radical thinking, but in other periods of history it was a given.”
I wanted to use my whole heart...
