When farming and photography mix

Mar 11, 2010

Photographer Keith Skelton and “White Corn” on view at the Mill Street Cafe in Sydenham until April 1

In order to enrich the Saturday night slow food dining experience at the Mill Street Café in Sydenham and to promote local art in the community, the café’s owners Pat and Rick Dawson have invited a group of artists under the leadership of Alana Kapell to put on juried shows at the cafe's gallery space, which is open for public viewing during the week.

The current show of photography by Keith Skelton of Battersea, titled “Food, Fuel, Millennium Corn” is a thought-provoking show whose high points are the three panoramic photographs of a single corn field and its variations in appearance in different seasons. The individual titles of the three panoramas are White Corn, Green Corn and Cut Corn and in each photo the central focal point is a narrow path that splits the photo in half, meandering from the foreground back into the field where it disappears from view. The images have a sense of mysterious foreboding.

Skelton, who lives in Battersea and who has been farming organic grass beef cattle for over 20 years, has been taking pictures for even longer and it is no wonder that these two occupations, farming and photography have crossed paths.

When asked about the title of the show Keith answers thoughtfully, “It’s a gently political comment on the fact that we are taking and turning corn into bio fuels to put it into our cars and trucks instead of feeding people with it, which does not seem like a very practical way to overcome the end of oil because we simply can’t grow enough corn.”

He continued, “If every kernel of corn in the United States of America went into producing ethanol so that there was no corn in all of America to eat they would only reduce their oil requirement by 12%.” Through the show Keith is also exploring the changes in the medium of photography itself. His panoramas incorporate both old and new techniques of photography.

The single panoramic views of the corn field are initially photographed with a 35 mm print camera where overlapping sequential shots are taken and then processed into prints.

The prints are then scanned into a computer and using Photoshop Keith then “stitches “ the separate images together into a single image which is then printed with pigmented inks as a ink jet archival print on archival paper.

Keith’s photos are framed with black borders and the look harkens back to old classic black and white photographs of artists like Cartier-Bresson, who printed not only the image but also the black border of the negative. For Keith this “reiterates the fact that I am putting in the photograph exactly what I want.”

The photographs are mounted with bugle head screws and stainless steel cup washers, which for Keith also speak of “the mechanical nature of agriculture and to the kind of advertising done in the late 19th and early 20th century."

The show is thought provoking on a number of different levels. It will be on view at the Mill Street Cafe, 4400 Mill Street in Sydenham until April 1. The gallery is open from 10am – 4pm, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and during Saturday night dining. For more information on Keith Skelton visit www.keithskelton.ca. For information visit www.desertlakegardens.com or call 613-376-1533.