Featured Artist

Australian based photographer, Matthew Portch, was born and raised in Bristol, England, and spent the 1970s and 1980s in a typical middle class suburb. Television and movies were the artist's favorite distraction, especially anything from the USA. The backdrop of the North American scenery felt to him like an exotic antidote to the humdrum of the English city suburbs and countryside.

Artist Statement

In my youth I was a keen illustrator, spending hours pouring over the minutia of the subject matter. I wanted my drawings to feel as close to reality as possible. The work saw me enrolled in college at a young age where I studied Photography and Graphic Design. Drawing on my childhood memories, the visuals of the American landscape has remained a major influence on my photography in my adult life. I like my pictures aesthetically simple, clean and graphic, which resonates with my background in design. I also want my images to retain an air of perplexity; keeping them free of people and any notable present-day objects helps leave the viewer guessing. Could the picture have been taken now or decades in the past?

When I photograph a scene, I capture everything across the frame in focus to give a heightened sense of reality. Given each picture is deliberately simple and mundane, the detail of the capture is just as important as the subject matter and becomes a character of the image in itself. I use the full size of the sensor and prefer not to crop. I like to restrict myself to these disciplines as an austere part of the image process - a digital reverence to the era of large format film if you will.

My creative vision is to capture a calm and melancholic disposition in the landscape and create a scene of discernible simplicity to evoke an emotional and response from within.

‍