Look Here Blog

We recently received the following series from the thoughtful and talented Kiran Master. He’s been working on this – the SuperNature series – for a little while now, and we could not wait to find out what it’s about. His eloquent answers to some simple questions are below.

1. Were these all shot together in the same place?

These images form part of a wider project shot all over the place, some in India, a few in the UK, but primarily in America, and predominantly in the Midwest, Wisconsin especially where there is some enthusiasm for these amazing creatures.

2. Did you know about these animal forms beforehand or was this something you stumbled upon in your travels?

I had seen the odd one traveling around, but on this occasion made a more specific effort to track down ones that particularly interested me.

3. Does does this series address similar concerns/interests as those of your previous personal projects?

On one level I was just drawn to these massive creatures and their surreal presence, still and silent in the landscape. They have a striking visual appeal to me. However within the much wider scope of this ongoing project I find interesting the way nature and the ‘natural’ are represented to us, and how the wild and potentially hostile natural world is transformed, diminished, and then repopulated with a fiction of our own making. Safe, appealing and unthreatening; replacing the real with a manufactured cultural concoction that in effect claims to represent nature, and the ‘natural’, yet at the same time distorts and conceals the actual underlying and irreconcilable relationships at work. If there is any similarity between this and other personal projects it is this simple disconnection of our lives from the world we inhabit. These large fiberglass animals are a beautiful, exuberant technologically crafted set of beasts who from their lofty positions look down on us and claim their rightful place in the disney-fication of the natural world. With the development and manufacture of non-biodegradable fiberglass the irony is they will probably be around for a lot longer than many of their biological counterparts.

4. Your color and composition are so uniquely you. Can you talk about how you use color and composition to convey your vision?

It is difficult for me to be analytical about colour and composition. I find it is a purely intuitive visual process that I suppose is as much a factor of memory as association and many other intangibles. I am not aware of observing any specific rules of composition or colour and they are certainly not being recited in the back of my mind when photographing something. I do know that at a specific point in the framing of an image it comes alive, when up until that point it had only offered promise of life. It is the same with colour. At a certain point, after some maneuvering, the colour exceeds simple decoration and becomes the emotive backdrop and context for the image and its story.