“For me, there’s no difference between dream and reality…I never know if what I’m doing is done when I’m dreaming or awake” - Man Ray

Klaus Major’s new work ‘Unfamiliar Territories’ (Series I and II) is exhibited for the first time, at Blender Gallery, Paddington, Sydney. As a contemporary Sydney-based photo-artist, his aim is to “capture reality and abstraction, beauty and danger, external and within”.

This is his third solo show of pinhole photography, following the success of Reservoir at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, and Window at First Draft Gallery, Sydney.

The pinhole photographs in Series I were taken with a hand-made pinhole camera. Pinhole cameras are cameras without a lens, where light passes directly though a pin-sized aperture. With such small apertures (equivalent to approximately f100 to f1000), and long exposure times, pinhole images are often ‘softer’ than images made through a lens, have a wide angle of view, nearly infinite depth of field, and strong rectilinear perspective. Pinhole cameras can be engineered as precision optical instruments, or roughly improvised using a cardboard box or similar chamber – Major uses the latter.

On one level the photographs are vignettes of movement and space. For example, traces of sunlight reflected off buildings are captured as if the frames in a movie are compressed into one frame. Metaphorically, the photographs are also an exploration of reality, which is behind everyday reality, in the interplay of actions, dreams, time and memory, chance, and the influence of the unknown. There is an element of magic in the way this is triggered or revealed in the chemistry of silver and paper.

“Major prefers possibility to certainty, which is no way to live but a productive way to make art. These are immensely appealing sophisticated photographs, the beauty of which, under the right conditions, could make you weep” – Bruce James, Sydney Morning Herald.

Directly printed from photographic paper negatives, the photographs are box-framed as an echo of their origins.

The panorama photographs in Series II were taken with a film camera. On one level, the photographs are an interpretation of the Australian landscape, drawn from experiences of various remote locations across Australia, experiences such as the shimmer of white heat, or the hypnotic poetry of repeating forms.

Metaphorically, they can also be seen as an exploration of other realities, such as a personal inner world and mental states, exploring a fluid mix of what might be seen as forbidding or serene, and setting known reference points adrift.