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6 hours ago
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During my student years I did very traditional black-and-white landscape photography. I spent time in the Himalayas, Patagonia and Tasmania and came back with pictures of grandeur – what is sometimes described as “the sublime”. But while studying art history, I suddenly realised all this had been done before. I was caught up in an aesthetic that had been current 150 years earlier.
I put my work away in a drawer but I held back about 10 images that I loved, spread them out, and asked myself: “What is the commonality between these?” And it was that they all had a sense of space and were heading towards the abstract. Then I wondered if there was anywhere I could work with space, and use it as my subject.
That led to me camping out for weeks at a time on Lake Eyre, a vast, mostly dry Australian salt pan. My approach to photographing that landscape evolved over the years as I became increasingly attuned to the place, and my perception of it changed. Eventually I experimented with introducing mirrors into the compositions. The series this image is taken from, Blaze, is more recent and continues that process of bringing an extra element into the environment. This time I brought fire.
The Blaze series was created in the Menindee lakes system along the Darling-Baaka River in New South Wales. A series of dams were installed there in the 1960s and forests were flooded, so within a couple of years there were a lot of dead trees. Driving across one of the dams, I imagined one of those skeletal trees on fire. The image stayed with me until a few years ago, when the La Niña weather cycle reached Australia, increasing rainfall and causing the continent’s ephemeral rivers to spring back to life.
I headed back to Menindee and spoke to the local community about my idea, explaining that I envisaged the burning tree as a beacon drawing people’s attention to the way the river had been treated. It’s funny when you break through with an idea and it all starts falling into place.
Fire is an integral part of the Australian landscape. I started this project just a couple of years after Sydney was blanketed by smoke for months on end as bushfires swept through the east coast, and fire is used in farming and is an important part of the landscape for Indigenous people as well.
I spoke to a film pyrotechnics specialist, who came up with a simple system that allowed me to connect a few of the gas canisters generally used for barbecues to flexible gas lines called “slinkies”, which could be wired up the back of each tree, away from the wood and out of sight of the camera. These produced an outline of flames when we lit them, briefly turning the tree into a sort of fire sculpture. They’d only be lit for 15 or 20 seconds while I got the shot, and we also had bush fire aqua backpacks we could use to spray any stray embers. Even though these trees are dead, they’re still very important habitats. But the gas flames did no damage to them and the bugs and spiders that lived in them were unharmed.
At the end of the project, I stripped everything away to see what the fire did by itself. I wanted to photograph it coming straight out of the water, and also reflected by it. To achieve that, my assistant Nick and I walked a couple of kilometres out to where the water was, towing all our equipment, and then perhaps another kilometre beyond that – it’s so flat, you have to go that far before the water is even a metre deep.
The slinky was about 10cm under the water and we had to wait until the air was dead still – a rare occurrence – so the gas pooled above the water and created mini-explosions. As soon as we did the first test, we saw the flame taking on these organic shapes. I love that people look at the shapes and bring their own meanings to the images. To me, this one, Blaze 24, looks like a dragon.
Blaze #24 is part of From the Roster at Hamiltons Gallery, London, until 26 April
Murray Fredericks’ CV
Born: Sydney, 1970.
Trained: “Largely self-taught in conjunction with short courses on the techniques of exposing, film processing and printing. Once my exhibitions started getting noticed I went to the University of New South Wales and completed two master’s degrees in art. One practical and one research.”
Influences: “Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies kicked me off. From the grids of Bernd and Hilla Becher I learned about the power of seriality, and from the American photographers Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld and Richard Misrach I learned about the technical aesthetics of using negative film with large format cameras.”
High point: “Probably the early success of the film Salt, which went from being video documentation of my master’s work to winning 12 major film awards, including the Cameraimage Golden Frog for best cinematography, and being longlisted for the Oscars.”
Low point: “Being alone on the ice sheet in Greenland and getting told by satellite phone that a polar bear was coming for me. I had a long night in a blizzard waiting with flares and a rifle for an attack I couldn’t see coming.”
Top tip: “Follow your instincts, do your own thing, work harder than you dream.”
