Imperfect brings together two series of images by photographer David George: stunning night time colour prints, and delicate, hand-printed photogravures. Both intentionally use techniques whose results are both uncertain and unpredictable. The work was produced during repeated walks covering hundreds of miles along the North-East of England’s river corridors, the Tees, Tyne and Wear – from source to sea.
Long photographic exposures produce colour images that are both forensic and unreal, the camera records a world the eye can’t see: colours are transformed, nature moves, man-made structures are fixed. In the gravures, David George embraces a workflow in which variability, mistakes and the ‘war wounds’ of printing result in each print being stunningly unique. Both series explore a landscape continually reshaped by economic pressures, within which once monolithic post- industrial structures vanish.
“David George’s East of Eden is a project one can feel as well as see. The purposefulness and observational intensity of the walks, the studied care for processes, analogue or digital, in field or in studio seep into the work.
While the images often focus on the scars and relics of a specific post- industrial era and territory, there is a universal melancholy to their simultaneous ‘then and now-ness’. To steal from Tarkovsky, of whom these photographs and photogravures are at times reminiscent, here is an artist ‘sculpting in time’.” - Michael Upton, East London Photographers’ Archive
"Coming first in the book as well as their reconnaissance value coming first in daylight before the night shoots, the photogravures complement the night photographs which add a tactile, almost archival quality to the visual narrative. The delicate tonal range achievable through the photogravure process reveals aspects of drawing, making you feel you are witnessing almost a memory - the material presence not photographic as we are used to perceiving, more akin to painting. Together, the series forms a meditation on endurance, transience and how these rivers landscapes came back to David George, brought him full circle to where he came from.
In walking these waterways and coastlines, David George has captured more than landscapes: he has traced the enduring pulse of place and the quiet persistence of memory within." - Zelda Cheatle HFRPS, International Photography Curator
