RICHARD CHERRY PHOTOGRAPHY

My exhibition "Visual Palindromes" is on view at Les Livres Gallery, Colchester Library from 1 - 29 December 2009

The “Visual Palindrome” project is an extension of my interest in photographing natural forms. Just as a palindrome is a word that reads the same forwards or backwards, so the visual equivalent is an image that reads the same from left to right or right to left. The starting point for these images are photographs of natural forms such as rocks and stones, driftwood and bark. The photographs are then digitally transformed to create the palindrome. A major fascination of this procedure is that the outcome is hard to predict. When a form emerges that stimulates the imagination it is often only with hindsight that it can be seen to have been latent in the original image.

What the viewer sees in these pictures depends very much on the way the human brain attempts to construct meaning from visual information. Thus arrangements of lines, textures and shapes may be interpreted as human figures, animals, monsters etc. What is actually seen in these pictures depends on the viewer’s imagination and may well vary from viewer to viewer. Thus although the pictures are provided with titles, these are merely suggestive and there is no right or wrong way of interpreting them.

I have explored a number of variations of the basic theme. The simplest images are those in which the whole picture constitutes a palindrome. Sometimes only a component of the picture is transformed to create a new form set in its original landscape. Another variation is to make more than one transformation of the same image and then combine them into a single picture