“To me, photography is an art of observation.  It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” – Elliott Erwitt.

My name is Tomos Ifans.  It is 6:30 in the morning, it is March, and the air temperature is hovering around zero.  I am swimming, without a wetsuit, off the coast of Brighton, UK, and I am lost in a sea of colour and form.  It is utterly mesmeric and I am transfixed; I am not moving, just observing, and my body starts slowly shutting down.  I am saved from my reverie by my swimming buddy, the carpenter.  And so this story begins.

I have been shooting the water ever since, striving to do justice to nature’s motifs.  I’ve always been obsessed with reflections and the way they play with the world around us, subjugating form, playing with our senses, and suggesting the possibility of different realms; but since I started photographing these series of images, I’ve discovered distant places.  As the elements collide, reality seems to shift, as if through this confliction of nature we have reached a higher truth, another plane, where others are at play.  This upside down, inside out, topsy turvy world mirrors our own in many ways, and yet it moves to the rhythm of its own drum; it takes me back to the very beginning on occasion, where I see and feel the echoes of my past.

My images work in two ways.  From afar, you see them for what they are, they tap into the ideals of “soft fascination” and “blue health”.  However, when you draw nearer it changes the “aesthetic engagement”, they become something different entirely; the minutiae, the kaleidoscopic detail, the frequencies, the sheer genius of nature explodes out of the image. ***

The series – “the unorganised, the immeasurable, the eternal” – can be viewed here. (As can all my others).

My aim, as Gustav so memorably said, was to try and capture the moment when, “nature herself shivers with ecstasy”.

If you are interested in any of my pieces, please get in contact.

 

***  One can click through on the images here, to see them as large as possible on a screen, and one get a flavour of the imagery; but my work is best viewed at scale, on the finest photographic paper, using Giclée printing.  As ever, the gods and the devils are in the detail…