Matthew Portch says about himself:
“I was born in Bristol, England and now live in Melbourne, Australia.
As a child I was a keen illustrator spending hours pouring over the minutia of detail in each pencil sketch. I grew up in the seventies in the UK on a steady diet of North American culture via TV and Film. In the backdrop of this media was an exotic and colourful landscape that to me, was an immediate antidote to the English, every-day life.
I studied Graphic Design and Photography in Bristol and pursued a successful career in Graphic Design up to the present day. In the millennium, the new digital revolution of photography spurred my interest once more. Ironically, it was the large format colour film photographers from the sixties and seventies in North America who inspired me. I was fascinated by the seemingly ordinary street scenes and vistas that were all captured with fastidious detail. I discovered a more modern and practical process in the form of a technical camera, digital back, and precision optics, then proceeded to cast my own journey.
When I photograph a scene, I capture everything across the frame in complete focus. Given the theme is so sedate, the details of the capture is just as important to me as the subject and becomes a character of the image in itself. I use the full-size of the sensor and never crop. I like to restrict myself to these disciplines as the one austere part of the image process – a digital reverence to the capture of large format film if you will. My creative vision is to capture a calm and austere disposition in the landscape and create a scene of discernible simplicity to evoke an emotional response from within.”
About ‘Lost America’:
Lost America examines a quiet stillness in a forgotten landscape that is, in a sense: ‘on- pause’. Backwater towns and rural corners are juxtaposed against the ambiguity of isolated suburbia. Spaces appear frozen in time, their inhabitants absent or long since departed.
Some places have become a worn-out reminder of when America was building a brighter future. Other parts have thrived, displaying antithetical wealth and comfort. And for those, secluded in their untouchable hamlets; everything is as it should be. Ardently stagnant in their appearance, the images aim to unlock a moment of reflective contemplation and instill a melancholic feeling of familiarity.
Lost, in some respects that this is a part of the everyday landscape in America; the humdrum, the ordinary. Not always immediately conspicuous, one might not notice or acknowledge these spaces at all, especially when viewed within the vast stretch of America’s vista. Yet, when confronted with a single framed vignette, these spaces can appear to echo a moment of mournful reverie. Or, for some, they might just behold an alluringly sombre, still, abiding impression.
