LONDON.- Eleven presents new work by Harry Cory Wright. Hey Charlie is a celebration of over fifty years of Cory Wright's involvement with a particular bend in a river and the field beside it. These joyful images are the culmination of a lifetime of experience of the place in which he grew up and to which he has stayed connected throughout his life.
The sense of the impulsive, and indeed mischief, is reflected in the title. Cory Wright calls his brother’s name - a child's shout, an adult's beckoning - to coax him into causing a stir in a place they know so well. They are allowed once again to be little gods. They create interruptions in the otherwise placid landscape; set off rockets into an evening sky; peer inquisitively into a haze of smoke creeping around a river bend. These striking and transient impulses, and the photographs in which they are captured, were intended to shake off the burden of the past and of nostalgia, and to provoke the making of new memories; to re-imagine, reshape and reawaken a much-loved place.
Cory Wright has thus added a new dimension to the adventurous approach, reflected in his series Place in Mind (2010) and Journey Through the British Isles (2007), to uncovering the landscape and infusing it with prospect. This personal process has always involved the physical engagement with landscape in a way that echoes Richard Long while the jubilant, spur of the moment nature of the photographs recall the work of Jacques Henri Lartigue. However, here Cory Wright’s playful tone has a new and heightened focus: how our views of a well-known place might change over time as life adapts and the place adapts with it - the feelings of the small child still contained within those of the adult. Opportunity is always there.
For many years Cory Wright has worked exclusively with the large 10 x 8 inch plate camera. In this new series he mixes this approach with high end digital cameras that allow him to explore the opportunities afforded by post production and print. He sees these two approaches as complementary. "The particular - and somewhat self-important - nature of the 10 x 8 inch negative has always elevated the picture taking process and given weight to the final piece. I have found that working with digital cameras has allowed me to retain the importance of 'being there' and the photographic element of 'witness', and to add a further distillation of those aspects in post-production. In this series, where there is such a blend of real and fantasy, this combination of working methods has been invaluable".
Harry Cory Wright was born in 1963 and lives and works in Norfolk. His work was recently included in Landmark: The Fields of Photography at Somerset House, London (2013) which was curated by William A. Ewing, the noted photographic curator and historian, and also featured work by Darren Almond, Elger Esser, Hirsohi Sugimoto and Thomas Struth amongst others.
