User:Patrickshanahan

Patrick Shanahan: artist-photographer

Patrick Shanahan (born Manchester, England, 1955) is a British artist-photographer whose photographs investigate the contemporary cultural landscape, offering a seductive and unsettling re-imaging of modern urban environments.

Making full use of the scenographic, artificial aspects of large-scale photography, he produces topographic images that are close to the kinds of minimalism found in painting and sculpture. These largely unpopulated compositions are subjected to a pristine finish and treatment of light, colour and space that help to establish a tension between a real and constructed landscape - a landscape in which the distinction between reality and imagination seem to blur and we are left with a peculiar sense of spatial estrangement.

Shanahan works with a variety of medium and large-format cameras and shoots on colour negative film. The film is digitally scanned and then worked on in Photoshop. Large-scale chromogenic dye-coupler prints are produced in limited editions - see artist website for details.

The result is hyperreal and illusory images that transform the environs we may be used to seeing into something disturbing and strange - images that pose the artificial and natural in opposition to one another. We feel simultaneously connected to and spatially estranged from them and, in blurring the distinction between reality and imagination, his photographs alter the way we see and relate to the world.