Tim Atherton beat me to talking about Mike’s work , but for a long time, I’ve been totally captivated by Mike’s photography. The reasons for this are numerous, but I’ll mention just three;
His way of working is to not edit or work with his images until significant time has passed. From personal experience I know that this gives you the opportunity to distance yourself from your images and also to allow your idea of the ‘keeper’ to develop.
His vision is something that I know is lacking in my own work. Even when I can’t compose on the gg and just point and guess, my pics have a formalism that I can’t (not sure if I want to, either) avoid. In comparison, Mike has the art of capturing the glimpsed moment down to perfection.
Mike’s aesthetic also brings with it an intriguing problem that I can’t wait to see resolved. When you look at his work and speak to him, you know that the individual image is subservient to the whole - you cannot pull images out of the set - everything needs to be looked at as a unit. So the question, how do you present this? As sequenced images printed as one and put on the wall? As a web gallery? A book? A multimedia display? I’m working my way through this problem in a couple of series I’m doing - no answer yet - but for Mike I think it is an urgent question that needs resolution.
For those looking for a place to start, I can recommend this series , or Mike’s latest collection here.
(Edit)
Forgot to add that Mike’s latest series has two more components, here and here.
June 23rd, 2007 - 3:17 pm
[...] Mike Ryder has a strategic problem with his work that I find fascinating. I ‘ve written about him before. [...]