Russ Radcliffe

Medium Photography

E russrad@icloud.com
Instagram @thibaw123
Facebook @russ.radcliffe.1

Address 20 Niblick St, Rye VIC 3941

I have had a long term interest in photography though until recently a deeper engagement with it was sidelined by my career in the book industry.

My publishing work is now confined to observing the madness of the world through the eyes of Australia’s finest political cartoonists by editing and curating an annual collection of their best work (Best Australian Political Cartoons, ed. Russ Radcliffe, published by Scribe).

These days my photographic curiosity is inspired by the light, space and forms of the Peninsula. I guess you would call me a landscape photographer, though much of my best work is barely recognisable as such.

I am especially interested in abstract and atmospheric interpretations of land and sea rather than in their accurate reproduction. I am drawn to the unstable zones where sea and sky, space and form, light and dark, converge and defy simple categorisation.

I work primarily in monochrome — a level of abstraction which demands closer attention to structure, form and subtle gradations of light without the distraction of colour or the demand to be realistic.

We are constantly subjected to conventionally beautiful pictures filled with drama and colour, but pre-digested images drained of any recognition of strangeness and mystery do not celebrate the natural world — they reduce it to cliche. My ambition is to make resonant images that invite the viewer to linger, to give space for the play of emotion, imagination and thought. My photographs are not the record of an experience — they are the experience.