Bevil Templeton-Smith: Looking Closer

I enjoy defying photography norms. Ultimately, a photograph is a collection of spots of colour. How those spots are arranged informs our visual center, which forms a message in our brain which we like or dislike. These messages can range from pure black, through a lovely landscape scene, and everything in between.

My photographs in this set are of crystals of various household substances in polarised light on my 1970 Leitz Orthoplan polarising microscope. They have no recognisable subject to inform their scale. There is no figure or still life object to help to categorise that pattern. The result is no more than a colourful vista of shape and form, eliciting a visual adventure, but leaving the viewer questioning what they are looking at. This is intentional. The viewer must take it or leave it on this basis, not because it is a picturesque landscape or artful nude that can be compared to other picturesque landscapes or artful nudes.

Those familiar with my photographs are often forgiven for slipping and referring to them as my “paintings”. However paintings they are not. They are absolutely photographs of absolutely real things in their natural colour (when viewed in polarised light with a certain orientation of home fashioned wave plate or retarder). The originals producing these images can be retrieved from my cabinet of thousands of painstakingly made slides, and re-viewed in my microscope. They are sometimes photographed again, with a different configuration of polarising filters and wave plates, and at different angles, to produce entirely different photographs, much like a landscape photographer might revisit and photograph the same landscape at different times of the year, or from different perspectives.

I am very enthusiastic about my ongoing project to make photographs that continue to defy norms and expectations in photography, and show a fresh perspective on the world. I also enjoy bringing to light a set of real subjects which are hidden, and very difficult to find, see and photograph, but still absolutely real.

Some of my photographs (including some in this set) have been printed very large on Chromaluxe (dye sublimation print onto aluminium), and framed in beautiful black ash, and remain on the walls at Alveston Fine Art in Notting Hill, London. They should be seen ‘in the flesh’ to truly appreciate the vibrance and impact.

Different sets of images in this overall project have been recognised by inclusion in a successful joint exhibition titled Polychromo, at Alveston Fine Art in March 2023. With this work, I was also very proud to be awarded 2023 non professional Photographer of the Year in the Fine Art category in the IPA (International Photography Awards) in New York in October 2023.