Rivers, Lakes, and 42nd Street by Meirion Harries and Gareth Davies

About

Rivers, Lakes, and 42 nd Street is a meeting of energies: the confluence of two rivers. The first, the waterways of England, ripples across Gareth Davies’s panoramic images; the other, the urban flow of 42 nd Street, New York, is glimpsed through the shutter of Meirion Harries’s street photography. Two very different styles produce a unified effect – the familiar caught at an odd angle, made strange, made new.
Together, Harries and Davies present an exhibition of extraordinary force, whose 
harmonies and dissonances raise important questions about the impact of relentless twenty-first-century urbanisation. The idea is to show the beauty of nature lying beneath the most urban of landscapes - while at the same time showing that drama and beauty can also be created by man (and women, of course) and that some of the beauty can be pitiless eg street people.The 360 degree images that Gareth takes illustrate how nature surrounds and nurtures us. The 2D close framed images of 42 street reflect strikes at the landscape by man (and woman, of course).- demonstrations of ego and ambition.

Meirion Harries

I take the underwater panoramas in these shallow waters to show an unknown world which we cannot experience, even though we can see into the water from above. From below, the reflections from the water surface effectively hide the world above from this one, and that one way view intrigues me, as well as the view from within the world below being anyway very different from what we can see from above. The extreme angle of view of the panorama (vertically as well as horizontally) means that the image is a large proportion of a full sphere – and can be seen then as a representation of a complete world or globe beneath. I am generally attracted to liminal and watery zones, due to interests in the properties and role of water in life, the mythic role of water, and the idea of buried or submerged worlds, hence my interest in taking these photos.

Gareth Davies

http://www.meirionharries.com

http://www.tickpan.co.uk/​