The Dead Of Spring

Hannah dives into Jack Vine’s latest photographic series ‘The Dead Of Spring’, exploring the correlation between nature and architecture.

Jack started photographing when he was just eight years old with a little pocket camera, taking it everywhere. His passion grew over the years and he hasn’t stopped taking photos since. Conveying stories in his imagery from a young age has led into his work today, as well as exploring a lot more emotion. The emotion comes from his enthusiasm for landscapes and the natural world as it becomes more personal as well as wanting to help preserve its beauty.

When developing a new series, Jack’s usual route starts with a concept idea. However, this new series, ‘The Dead Of Spring’, he felt that the aesthetics of digital colour needed to be highlighted to move forward with the ideas he had in mind by using the tranquil sky as his backdrop with composition inspired by Karl Blossfeldt. This made an exciting change for Jack in his work and helped to develop his skills further.

Jack explains the project, “The Dead of Spring is a project that draws parallels between human structures and decaying plants. Focusing on the fragile nature of the decaying plants found at the beginning of spring.” The reasoning is that we are all surrounded by a lot of man-made objects, but we are all still inspired by nature, no matter how big or small.

Jack describes this in more depth.

“I wanted to highlight how we as a race are inspired by nature, even in our most simple architecture and how we impact on our environment in subtle ways as well as on a large scale. We play a large part in shaping the environment. We build great metal towers which mimic the natural world. By framing the pylons and lamp posts in the same way as I do the plants, all sense of scale is removed from the series and so all of the subjects feel like the same size. This was done to show how our architecture is inspired by the natural world and also how we need to maintain a balance between the natural world and the industrialisation of it.”

Aesthetics were the theme for Jack within this series as his normal approach would explore the context of an idea first and expand into imagery. This challenged his normal way of thinking as his previous ideas involved a concept which mirrored darker aesthetics after. But with the introduction of colour at the beginning of the project, Jack felt that this ignited a flow of consistency throughout the images and explained, “I let the aesthetics of the series lead me in the beginnings of the project, meaning the ideas and concepts followed later after reflecting on the first few shoots. My reasoning for this was that I wanted to create a visually stunning series that effectively made my audience feel tranquil and portrayed a sense of hope with this subtle underlying awareness of the environment and climate change.”

So with this passion for climate change within Jack’s new work, he is hoping to continue these themes throughout his on-going projects, as well as focusing on the effects it’s having on the landscape, the people who live in it and how we can overall help save our planet through imagery.

Check out more of Jack Vines’ stunning work on his Website and Instagram.

EnvironmentViridis Magazine9 September 2020