Mark Cator
Photographer Mark Cator has captured many different types of landscape and lifestyle on camera, inspired by ‘the significance of a place’.
Here we see Horses on Halvergate Marsh, a timeless image where even horses are dwarfed by the space of the sky and the shape of the clouds. Breydon Water, South Flats gently leads the eye with nothing more than the delicate traces of the tideline - a freedom of space over which to ponder and thoughtfully project our own images - while in New Road , Acle the focus is on the paradigms of convenience.
Artist's statement
The beauty of any medium is how far you can push its capability, and by pushing the boundaries, alter your own way of looking at the world. I began in photojournalism and today move between figurative illustration and a deliberately ambiguous and indeterminate structure of visual synthesis.
As a photographer it’s hard to be honest with a landscape. In the twenty-five years of photographing the part of Norfolk where I live, the lie of the land has changed, but this change is as much in what I see as in how I view it.
The first body of work published was Marshland, a lyrical, poetical tribute to the River Bure in Norfolk. It captures a sense of passing, a space to hide, run free, shout, catch onto a cloud, or simply to wallow in isolation. It is a land of waterborne dreaming, a thousand hallelujahs, eerie incandescence, songs of laughter, hangdog days spiked by the onrush of a storm, people known or met and subsequently cajoled to stand for a portrait in front of the camera like the freezing of time and weather. Horses on Halvergate is taken from this collection.
Then my eye turned towards a world I had closed off. Hinterland, published the following year in 2006, recorded a passing landscape, the chronology of destruction and creation, the paradigms of convenience and confinement and the nostalgic visual legacy of the post-industrial environment. It was a strange experience and along the way I learnt to appreciate the inadvertent beauty of the ordinary and what American photographer Robert Adams refers to as ‘the significance of a place’.
Keen to get back in to the wide open spaces, I turned my attention to Breydon Water and its brutally minimal landscape. For the next year, working with the 5 x 4 field camera, I prowled the boundaries of a territory made familiar to me through the work of the nineteenth century photographer P. H. Emerson. Breydon Water, South Flats illustrates this deeply evocative wilderness tucked into the crook of Great Yarmouth, but it is not a landscape clamouring for adoration. It gives and takes with equal voracity, willing to be brought to life by a single digger, dyke, willow or ageing windmill. It is a landscape that moves on a flicker of wind and rests back into grey anonymity.
More recently I have focused my lens closer to home, paring down the elemental to that which confronts me on a daily basis; roaming no further than the confines of my own garden, or recording in detail the constant switching of the water’s surface from the upstairs window of my son’s bedroom.
