The art world has by incriments merged photography into the toolbox of traditional, as well as non traditional or post modern art mediums. It almost seems unnecessary to label a gallery with a photo or fine arts label, because the modernist notion of valuing one medium over another no longer can be used as an instrument in dictating the art object's worth. Today it appears most mediums are on equal footing, although one medium or another might be more in vogue within a particular context. The context I'm referring to is cultural in nature and as such places equal weight on the individual art forms of the diverse universe of art styles.
Bill Coates is a writer/photographer who works within the tradition of the landscape photographer, i.e., the beauty and diversity of nature becomes the subject matter which precipitates the pleasurable or aethetic experience. As a photographer his job is to extract this beauty and translate it into the photograph. Which sounds simple enough until various technical difficulties enter into the making art equation, which in essence involves recreating nature. This sifting together of the multitude of ingrediants to create the photograph then becomes the personal act of the artist reified.
In "Brittlebush," one sees a profusion of yellow daisy like flowers rising from the desert floor, the result of a refreshing rain after a long and extended dry spell. The flowers extend into the landscape like so many warm sunny faces. They share the space with long thin linear stems and rounded leaves which are green in hue. Through the openings of the canopy of green and off into the distance the earth appears, the stems have created a physical link to the yellow brittlebush and the earth and thus have established a unity or association between the two.
The symbolism of life and fertility, established by formal associations of the compositional elements, thus becomes dependent and linked to the various parts of nature acting in harmony. One sees in the beauty and pleasure of the rain produced brittlebush a reflection of man's connection with nature.
Out of the darkness of the earth an opening or "worlding" has occurred through the yellow brittlebush growth, a kind of light out of the darkness. Simultaneously, a lighting of Being, which is the aesthetic event, occurs in the feelings experienced. With the joy of spring comes the full blossom of nature.
Jim Coates