Simon Norfolk

Shroud

History alters landscapes. Humans, aware or not, intervene on the land they traverse. This is why Simon’s landscape photography is so deeply significant and powerful. The images are never neutral; the land they depict always carries layers of meaning. Simon interprets it. We have to decipher it.

We, as humans, inhabiting this planet, cause/create/alter/destroy the territory that we occupy, with our activities, habits and desires.

'Shroud' is a solemn meditation on the state of the climate crisis affecting the world’s glaciers. The reference to a funeral veil, is to the remains of an extreme attempt to slow down the melting, where special blankets were draped over the ice to maintain its low temperature and slow its disappearance. The desperate intention, briefly successful, is now marked by images that are nothing but gravity and melancholy. Large-format prints stand sadly as the witness to a well-intended but failed attempt at a feeble solution to a human-made problem.

That’s what we humans do. We strike, then we hide the hand. We destroy, then attempt solutions. We alter places and spaces to our pleasure or benefit, without acknowledging possible disastrous collateral effects.

The dramatic beauty of the images triggers a meditative mental space that allows us to reflect on the effect of our actions; on the long-term duration of our decisions and the powerful by-products of man-made acts. With awareness or without, our passage on this Earth is not without consequences, ultimately re-directed back onto our own selves.

Simon Norfolk (Lagos, Nigeria, 1963) lives in Hove and Kabul. He is a landscape photographer whose work over twenty years has been themed around a probing and stretching of the meaning of the word ‘battlefield’ in all its forms. As such, he has photographed in some of the world’s worst war zones and refugee crises but is equally at home photographing supercomputers used to design military systems or the test-launching of nuclear missiles. Time’s layeredness in the landscape is his ongoing fascination.

His work has been widely recognised: he won the Discovery Prize at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2005, the Infinity Prize from the International Center of Photography in 2004, and the European Publishing Award for 2002. In 2003, he was shortlisted for the Citibank Prize, now known as the Deutsche Börse Prize, and in 2013, he won the Prix Pictet Commission. In addition, he has also won multiple World Press Photo and Sony World Photography Awards.

He has work held in major collections such as the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The Getty in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wilson Centre for Photography and the Sir Elton John Collection. His work has been shown widely and internationally from Brighton to Ulaanbaatar. In 2011, his 'Burke + Norfolk' work was one of the first-ever photography solo shows at Tate Modern in London.