LONDON.- Silent Exchange is an exhibition of award-winning photography by one of the world’s most celebrated landscape photographers, Charlie Waite.

In a career which spans a lifetime at the forefront of international landscape photography Charlie Waite has held over 30 solo shows worldwide, published more than 25 photography books and is an acknowledged thought leader for landscape photography. A celebrity within the photography fraternity, Waite started out his career photographing actors including Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter, Amelia Fox and Catherine Zeta-Jones amongst others and is the man behind the Landscape Photography Awards, which he started to encourage more people to take up landscape photography.

Bringing together Waite’s most important landscapes to date as well as new works, Silent Exchange will showcase Waite’s personal response to beauty, in an exhibition of over 50 images which spans a lifetime at the forefront of landscape photography.

Instantly recognisable, Waite’s landscapes are rare perfections of light, colour and composition, offering the viewer a glimpse of a moment of beauty carefully framed by a master craftsman. Waite’s photographs aim to encourage an emotional response from the viewer based on the silent exchange between viewer and landscape.

In the modern era of the visual image, it is extremely rare and brave for a photographer to choose to depict beauty for its own sake rather than opting to confront the viewer with images that challenge. Instead, Waite’s photographs aim to bridge the gap between beauty and art, and in doing so offer an alternative to the bleak realism and sombre concerns of much modern landscape photography.

It is his supreme sensitivity to rhythm, shape and colour and his marvelous compositional sense which sets Waite’s work apart from mere romantic rhetoric. While his reluctance to compromise permits him to fully explore photography’s unique relationship with light.

Famed for the luminosity and inner quietude of his landscapes, Waite has often been compared to the great American landscape photographer Ansel Adams. With Silent Exchange, Waite asks the viewer to consider their own personal response to beauty and to question society’s contempt for beauty as an intrinsic value of art.

Charlie Waite on Silent Exchange: In this exhibition I am sharing my personal response to those moments of beauty that I have discovered as I travelled around the world – be they man-made or natural. The wonderful thing about photography is that it allows that moment of perceived beauty to endure, and to be shared. Each person will respond to the images in Silent Exchange in their own special, silent way. What evoked a response to beauty in me will have its own unique effect on each person that sees the image.

Charlie Waite is now firmly established as one of the world’s leading landscape photographers. He has had a number of highly acclaimed one man shows throughout his career including the Goldstrom Gallery on Broadway, New York in 2001, Hope at the OXO Gallery, London in 2002 and Earthscapes at The Centre For Photographic Art in Carmel, California in 1999. Waite has published 28 books on photography and held over 30 solo exhibitions across Europe, the USA, Japan and Australia.

Waite is the recipient of numerous awards including the prestigious Honorary Fellowship to the British Institute of Professional Photographers as well as Amateur Photography’s Power of Photography Award and is frequently invited all over the world to give lectures on landscape photography. A leading expert in his field, Charlie has written columns for The Daily Telegraph and presented a number of photography television series for ITV along with frequent appearances on BBC Breakfast and BBC Countryfile.

In 1992 Waite’s bestselling book The Making of Landscape Photographs was ground breaking in the way that it addressed the ‘business of making landscape images’ and is now required reading for all students of landscape photography. The Independent said of the book ‘Waite puts the soul back into the literature of landscape photography.’ His books, Landscape of Spain with text by the Duke of Wellington and Venice with Jan Morris were both highly acclaimed throughout the UK in the 90s.

Outside of his own career Waite has done more than any other British photographer to raise the profile of photography and in doing so has become the champion of the everyman photographer. Waite started the annual Landscape Photographer of the Year Awards, which he set up to encourage the British to use their camera to engage more closely with their environments whether urban or rural and in 2013, Waite launched Landscape Photographer of the Year in the USA. In addition Waite set up a company Light& Land, which runs professional landscape photography workshops and tours all over the world.

Born in 1949 Waite was inspired to take up photography by his father a keen portrait photographer and RAF Air Commodore CB CBE whose brainchild was the Berlin Airlift. Waite started out as a professional actor and remained an actor for ten years, but soon began a sideline photographing his fellow actors including Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham-Carter, Amelia Fox and Catherine Zeta-Jones amongst others.

Throughout his time in the theatre, Waite became fascinated by theatrical lighting and design, but gradually the landscape and the way it can be revealed through light and shade stole him away from the acting profession.

As a professional photographer, Waite has established a worldwide reputation for his particular approach to his work. His style is unique in that his photographs convey a spiritual quality of serenity and calm.

Waite’s photographs are held in private and corporate collections throughout the world.