Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

I was introduced to Peter Dombrovskis by Joe Cornish, who counts him as one of him primary influences when he was starting photography. I browsed a couple of books of Joe’s whilst on a large format workshop in Gower, Wales and was struck by how the photos had hardly aged at all. Despite some unfamiliar colour in older pictures, these could have been made yesterday. It is this very unforced and yet structured compositional style that I think Joe was most enamoured of (and of course Peter’s exceptional environmental record and his love of getting right into the landscape).

My urge to buy the book rose again a few weeks ago when I was browsing around some old photographers websites and I looked for places to buy it. Unfortunately, the only copy I could find was in a bookshop in Australia – this wasn’t going to stop me though so many pounds poorer (£68 + airfare from here, I received a long distance air mail package and reverentially opened up the (beautifully printed) book and spent a good couple of hours absorbing the pictures and text therein.

Firstly, this book is very well printed on wonderful stock so it is a pleasure to look at and touch. Most importantly however, these are photographs that blend a great photographic vision with a great sense of place. This isn’t a pyrotechnic display of photographic ability, a lot of these pictures hail back to Eliot Porter’s sense of natural beauty and quiet compostion, but now and again, a photograph will appear on the next page that will blow you away completely – for instance the Myrtle tree picture shown in the sidebar. Mostly, the pictures reveal a landscape of great variety, from mountains tops to pillow moss plains variously looking alpine and sub-tropical.

The book is fitting testimony to one of the worlds great photographic environmentalists. My only regret is that he didn’t publish more of his work..

I’d recommend watching this brief video about Peter’s work around Gordon Splits.

Peter’s Website

UPDATE: Richard Downer pointed out a couple of great links with more of Richard’s pictures

National Library of Australia images
A personal gallery of Peter’s pictures