Make it stand out
Neal Panton is a fine art photographer who specializes primarily in landscapes. He favours large-format prints and panoramas.
Photography for me is the purest and most personal way I can share what I feel about life. I try to create photos that are not passive but more reflective. In this reflection viewers can discover their own unique meaning and deeper connection to my photographs.
I make images intended to quiet the restless mind like the snow crunching underfoot in the dead of a winter night. My photography inhabits a wordless world showing how my subjects feel when you touch them, how every detail and texture resonates.
Neal has been photographing since 1984 exhibiting since 1992 and is primarily self-taught. He has won or been nominated for over three dozen awards, some in the Columbia Basin region, others from Europe and the USA.
He has worked as a photojournalist for Reuters, taught photography and visual literacy, been published in over 25 countries, had 16 solo exhibits and 59 group exhibits in Canada, Europe, the United States, and South America, and self-published nine books and catalogs showcasing his images. His work has been written about and featured over the past 30 years in magazines and newspapers worldwide. Neal is represented by Art Gallery Kimberley locally and internationally by Turning Art and Glasshouse Images in the USA.
The Art of Creating Sense of Place
Written by Irma de Visser, Holly Truchan and Neal Panton
Artist Statement
How do we experience and make meaning of a particular place? Photographic artist Neal Panton uses his camera lens to create connection to a place. Photography nurtures Neal’s feeling of belonging. According to Neal, it is this deeper emotional connection that makes places worth caring about.
Neal’s latest solo art exhibition entitled, “Sense of Place” represents how people experience and make meaning of a particular area and encourage a feeling of belonging for the people who live there. For this exhibition, Neal’s focus was on the Kootenays in beautiful British Columbia. Over the years of living in the Kootenays, Neal has spent a lot of time exploring its diverse landscapes. The mountains in the Kootenays provide Neal endless opportunities to make great photographs. Neal says, “the challenge to me as an artist is to find a unique way of seeing things that people see all the time, to bring a unique point of view to the world around us”.
When asked what Neal’s challenges were when creating this exhibition, he explains that in the last 10 years or so he has been working on panoramic stitches, the process of taking several photos that can be merged into one photo to make a larger photographic canvas. Neal explains, “in my practice, photography is a challenge of exclusion to make your work more impactful. Making panoramic images is another process altogether as the final product is the practice of inclusion. I find it more of a challenge to compose in this way and to maintain the impact of the final panoramic photograph.”
“Sense of Place” is a collection of largely panoramic photographs utilising metal printing. Printing the photographs on metal creates stunning images due to the smooth surface of the material as well as it helps keep down weight and cost of the artworks. Creating solo exhibitions to mount in physical spaces is a costly undertaking, but as Neal puts it “Like a song, all art forms require time from the viewer to absorb, contemplate and learn from the artwork. To make an emotional connection that is both visceral and intellectual requires time spent with the artwork”.
There are two things Neal enjoyed the most during the creation of this exhibition. Firstly, he feels privileged to be heading out into this part of the world with an idea in mind. “It’s a joy to be able to venture out and search out a point of view that illustrates the shared experience of the Kootenays.” Secondly, selecting photographs for an exhibition is challenging, exhilarating, joyous, and meaningful to Neal. “Reliving these moments helps me find the connection that exists between all the photographs. I’m a firm believer that we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are. Creating an exhibition reinforces this belief.”
Artist Biography
Growing up in a blue collar, immigrant family in Hamilton, Ontario - an industrial city one hour from Toronto - exposed Neal to a great variety of people, cultures and points of view. Within the family, photographs were always being shared. This was how Neal got to know his family overseas and how his family shared their experience in Canada. It was through these early experiences that Neal developed an understanding of visual language.
Neal is a self-taught photographer. After taking one night school course in the basics of photography, he got his first camera at the age of 22. Most of Neal’s photography and art education has come from books and observation. Neal has worked as a university professor of Photography and Visual Language, and he spent a year as a photojournalist for Reuters news agency.
Photography has been Neal’s primary creative outlet since 1984 because it is closely associated with reality. Playing with this expectation helps him find his particular photographic point of view and personal style. As Neal often presents his work in black and white, he has had to train his eyes to see in that way, always keeping the final product in mind. Neal’s work is a combination of intuition and skill, and he creates photos that are reflective rather than passive. In this reflection viewers can discover their own unique meaning and deeper connection to the image. He uses digital cameras and also scanners to create his photography. Using photoshop, Neal creates photographs that resemble the darkroom photography process that highlights his particular style; “I have been told often that my photographs don’t look like photographs”. Photography is Neal’s way to communicate and form alliances in the
world. People often respond to his images with their own narrative; Neal’s photo, their story.
Acknowledgements
“Sense of Place” has been made possible by the support of Mike Paugh and associates at IG Wealth Management in Cranbrook and by the Columbia Basin Trust through its Arts Funding To Communities grant program which is delivered by the Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance. The exhibition will be available at Key City in Cranbrook from January 30 until march 31st. The opening reception will be held on February 9 from 7pm – 9pm with musical guest Tyrel Hawke. Due to maintenance issues at Centre 64 in Kimberley, Neal’s exhibition at the Centre 64 Gallery has been rescheduled for the fall of this year.