Ned Pratt: From Salmonier to Path End: New Works

"Newfoundland gives you time. My memories of places I knew as a child give me time. I don't feel rushed to make observations in a landscape that I know and love intimately. A landscape that is sometimes vast and foreboding and at other times gentle, but always sublime."

 

- Ned Pratt

On his drive from Salmonier to Path End along the Southern Coast of Newfoundland, Ned Pratt passes a grocery store, a gas station, and a singular restaurant. He knows the area well, and so engrained is the province’s visual language in his imagination that on occasion, he envisions photographs he might “find” before he’s even come across them. He sketches them quickly at home and then drives around in search of them. Even after finding them, Pratt will return to the location many times, waiting patiently for each element to line up just as he imagined them: clouds that are billowing rather than wispy, an expanse of sea that is flat and serene rather than choppy.

Pratt doesn’t photograph the province “as it is;” instead, his lens is guided by the way he sees the landscape before him. He organizes the world into line, form, and colour like a grid in a Mondrian painting. The result is a series of elegant, abstracted compositions with the sea, sky, and structures of Newfoundland deconstructed into formal elements.

Pratt also collapses all sense of distance, bringing viewers directly up against a grid of his own creation. In Pratt’s hands, a quintessential image of Newfoundland becomes organised neatly into colour, shape, and line. Once there is a harmonious balance, Pratt deems the photograph complete and each element is locked into place. A hush falls over the image, and subsequently over his viewers as they look at it. 

"I am always amazed by the stillness of your photos, a quality that seems to carry something of you. Is this something you strive for?"

 

- Charles Meanwell

 

 

"Yes, when a photograph reaches its quietest I know it is complete. There is very little temptation to wonder what is beyond the image itself, outside the picture plane."

 

- Ned Pratt