Hamiltons presented Abstract and Intentional, an exhibition by British photographer, Charles March, between 2 – 14 February 2015. The work follows the tree theme represented in his previous series Nature Translated, and was photographed in St Petersburg, January 2014, whilst March was exhibiting at The Russian State Museum (Marble Palace). A catalogue was produced to accompany the exhibition.
A very personal body of work, Nature Translated represented the trees and landscapes March was exposed to throughout his childhood, marking a significant turn from his highly formal still life advertising photography of the 1990s, and symbolising an important part of March’s personal and wider history. Abstract and Intentional further highlights his shift from literalism and continued exploration of personal expression. Playfully experimenting with composition, abstraction, scale, movement and light within this body of work, March focuses on a single detail, enlarging and distorting the reality thus encouraging the viewer to delve ever deeper into their imagination to envision the whole. His work reveals how radically the photographic world has evolved and demonstrates how flexible the medium is in the hands of an inventive practitioner. March uses no tools - although he tends to shoot with a digital camera, his work does not depend on equipment to create the outcome we see.
Philippe Garner, who was with March in Russia, writes “The resulting pictures, printed to a dramatic size that irresistibly draws your attention, inspire the imagination and transform the specific into the symbolic and evocative; these pictures confound the popular expectation that a photograph must represent a precise moment in time. Instead, they convey a sense of extended experience – of a passage through time, a dream sequence of blurred effects from an impressionistic movie.”
March has nurtured an interest in photography since the age of twelve. He spent time as an apprentice for Stanley Kubrick, worked as a documentary photographer in Africa and later spent twenty years in the advertising industry. He has exhibited globally and his work is held in a number of private collections.