Alexander Brattell’s intention with his monochrome images that observe snippets of everyday life is to document the ‘sensation of seeing’ as he fixes moments of heightened awareness in search for resonance beyond subject matter. His last two series of works are titled ‘Tupla’, which is a materialised thought form in Tibetan mythology, and ‘Qualia’, a philosophical term referring to ‘the nature of experience’, and he sees his works as an enquiry into a language that’s purely visual, that has the potential to describe sensations that words struggle to convey.
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Singly, these images work as visual poems and sometimes as evocations of place; in a series, they take on a narrative quality which is highly open to interpretation by the viewer.
Brattell uses traditional techniques to produce his photographs, shooting on negative film and hand printing each image himself in a darkroom to make silver gelatin prints, and the process of making work in this way - the transmission of light, the analogue journey via the latent image to the final print – is a fundamental part of the work for him. Composition is equally important and Brattell has a personal discipline of only ever printing the full frame of any image he takes and never cropping. This is again going back to the roots of photography where the creative process begins through the lens, and he confirms this with the black key line – the perimeter of the negative – which surrounds each of his images.
Much of Brattell’s work was shot in London and costal areas around the south east of England , but projects have also taken him to Poland, Italy, the USA and Southern Africa. London exhibitions have included those at Camerawork Gallery, The Clerk’s House Gallery in Shoreditch, and The Gallery Café. Recent solo shows have been at Conquest Hospital, Hastings (September 2012) and at the Marina Post Office in St Leonards on Sea (Nov 2010) and selected group exhibitions have been at the Jubilee Library in Brighton as part of the Brighton Photo Biennial Photobook Show (Oct 2012), Margate Harbour Arm Gallery (Oct 2012) and at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery (Sept 2012-Jan 2013). Previously London based, he now resides in St Leonards on Sea, East Sussex. .