Alan Carter SOA – portfolio

Contact the artist

07983 677555
arjcarter42@gmail.com

Exhibition information

The photographs I’m showing as part of the South Oxford Arts exhibition are from a project I started several years ago photographing windows, what’s seen through them and what’s reflected in them.

Increasingly abstract, it has expanded to explore the idea of parallel lives, using as a central theme lines from the Philip Larkin poem The Whitsun Weddings: “And none thought of the others they would never meet, or how their lives would all contain this hour”.

The original images were mostly taken on a Nikon 1 V1 with a wide-angle zoom and a polarising filter to control the reflections, extensively post-processed using Photoscape Pro.

Artist information

I’ve been taking photographs almost all my life – certainly since being given a Kodak Instamatic for my 7th birthday.

My main interest for many years was landscape photography, interspersed with the opportunities long-distance travel provided – including to China via the Trans-Siberian railway in the dying days of the Soviet Union, and later to Malaysia and Singapore.

The advent of digital photography, and the possibilities it affords to manipulate and enhance images prompted an interest in specific subjects, notably photographing trees and modern architecture.

My current focus, and the subject of the photos I’m showing as part of the South Oxford Arts’ exhibition, centres on windows – what’s seen through them and what’s reflected in them.

I tend to treat the original photo as raw material – the flour, eggs and butter from which I attempt to create a cake – arriving at the finished print via numerous post-processing steps on a laptop.