Darren Almond: To Leave a Light Impression

Darren Almond has been making his ‘Fullmoon’ photographs for over a decade now, travelling to ever more remote and starkly beautiful environments. The results are never less than astonishingly eerie and captivating. Yet the essential idea is incredibly simple. Almond shoots in the middle of the night with only the full moon for illumination. Accommodating for the low light level, he uses a long exposure – sometimes of an hour or more – a process which lends the works a strangely flattened, ethereal quality, and a wonderfully alien sort of luminosity.

In photographs of Patagonian mountains and valleys, for instance, the air itself seems crystalline, while a eucalyptus forest in Tasmania has a weirdly murky, underwater feeling. Elsewhere, snaking rivers become transformed by the slow exposure into shimmering strips of pearly iridescence. Scale often becomes hard to gauge. The black, towering crags of a volcanic archipelago seem like small lumps of coal, while other scenes of trees and train tracks similarly resemble toy models. This sense of artifice enforces the idea that, despite their resemblance to the romantic paintings by the likes of Caspar David Friedrich, Almond’s images are the result of mechanical recording rather than human, vision.

Unfortuantely, other pieces in the show aren’t quite as engaging. The lunar theme continues with Almond’s huge photographs of ancient standing stones in the Outer Hebrides, and also with the 12 small, brass columns whose weights correspond with each of the astronauts who walked on the moon. The ideas are to do with human desire for absolute measurement and our inability to comprehend the distances and changes that occur on a cosmic scale. Yet, these works feel just that little bit too pat and schematic in contrast with the profound, chimerical strangeness of ‘Fullmoon’.

Gabriel Coxhead