Paul Caffell

Landscape Photographs

Paul Caffell worked and exhibited as a painter, exploring photography to capture figurative subjects as his art moved towards abstraction.  He did his own silver printing and so had some familiarity with the darkroom.  His epiphany occurred when he was shown the vintage platinum print of Frederick Evans’s famous ‘Sea of Steps’ in the Royal Photographic Society collection.  It was love at first sight.

Paul Caffell has made platinum prints of a selection of his own photographs.  In a Romantic tradition that has a long history in British art, he has turned to the mysterious enclosed spaces of forests for his archetypal subjects.  He proves himself the visual equivalent of a composer-conductor, able to anticipate within his negative or ‘score’ the delicate orchestration of tones that as a printer he will be able later to extract.   And again working in a long tradition, he has turned to the nude as a central theme within his work.  His figure studies, sometimes set within his forest grounds, have a sombre and enigmatic character, gesture and pose inviting interpretation as mystical symbols.

© Philippe Garner
London, October, 2007