14.09.10
Gerard Keenan: Monochrome Portraits
Gerard Keenan started this personal fine art project in 2005. He’s from Galway in Ireland, where there are a lot of horses in wide open fields. One day, when he was driving to the city, he spotted one with her head over a wall. He stopped and took her picture. Over the next couple of years, he built up a large portfolio of images of lone horses in fields.
“To date, I have taken well over 500 images of horses and have edited them to around 70, but I am now looking to go back into the archive and edit again.”
The main draw for Gerard is clouds. He believes they make his shots and he will only go out when he sees atmospheric clouds. When shooting unbridled horses in their environments he approaches the horse and shoots the angle he thinks best for the photograph.“To photograph animals you need to have a deep respect for them in the first place.”
“I don’t have elaborate lighting set-ups; I just go with the flow and see what happens.
“I just take the shot and that’s it, it’s all over pretty quickly.”
Gerard grew up on a farm. He has always been interested in wide open spaces and minimalist art, especially high-contrast work.
The lighting in Orson Welles’s 1941 film Citizen Kane, along with other classic old movies, had a big influence on him, as did the work of the French photographer Jeanloup Sieff. He likes paring things down to the bare minimum and getting rid of clutter.
Whatever the light dictates he photographs and shoots hand held in RAW. Normally he uses ISO 200 or 400 and as long as he gets the main subject in focus, he is happy
“But I do believe in getting the shotright in camera. When I started out in photography I worked in a darkroom and developed my own negatives and prints. Then I graduated to Photoshop and scanned in the negatives. In Photoshop I do what I would have done in the darkroom which is to dodge and burn, because I love high-contrast images. In camera I shoot in colour and convert to black and white in Photoshop and then dodge and burn.”
Gerard believes you have to photograph what you want to and that the use of Photoshop should be kept to a bare minimum.
“You can be inspired by other photographers, but at the end of the day you have to have make your own statements and you have to have your own signature. This is very important to stand out. I would say my signature is atmospheric high contrast. There’s a touch of melancholy in my work, which is a reflection of my own feelings from time to time.”
He doesn’t advocate getting hung up on using the latest technology, but advises to use what is available or what you can afford, and to make the most of it.
What's in your kit bag?
I started on film with an old Pentax K1000 with a Pentax wide-angle lens. Then I moved on to digital with a Fuji S3 Pro, but still mix the two together for these horse shots. Today I have a Fuji S5 Pro.
Biography
Gerard is an award-winning photographer from Ireland. His work is collected worldwide. He specialises in black-and-white work and has won awards from the World Photographic Arts Black-and-White Spider Awards 2008 and B&W Magazine in the US, and received honorary mentions in the IPA Awards 2009. His image Horses #5 now hangs in the Ralph Lauren store in Singapore. He lives in London.
www.gerardkeenan.com
This feature is from the July issue, back issues can be ordered by calling 01858438832 or emailing photographymonthly@subscription.co.uk
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