Salt, 2016

Flying in an open door helicopter at 250-500 feet, David Burdeny had to time the shoot precisely to capture the various light reflections on the Salt Flats in Utah and in Australia. David is fascinated by the opportunity to invest symbols and narrative into built form or see the metaphor in a material space, having an abiding interest in thresholds and luminal spaces – places that seem somehow a bridge between the concrete and the ephemeral, elevated above time, hallowed. The sublime resides even in an ordinary space. And while the wondrous capabilities of the digital process permits an extraordinary level of clarity, detail and sensuality to be ingrained into an image, Burdeny likes to think that there is a mystery at the heart of all his photographs, an appeal for the viewer to keep looking and see more. The raw immediacy and lived experience of taking a photograph matters as much to David Burdeny as how he composes the frame. It is his private personal connection to these places and the emotional or intellectual intrigue that grips him through the process that Burdeny hope resonates in the print.

“[Related to] Drift, I was conceptually thinking of this series as kaleidoscopic in reach where all parts of the world were reduced to earth/ocean and sky bound by the horizon, so I travelled around with it and made a series of abstractions that blurred (no pun intended) the distinction between sky, land and water. The “Salt” series came much later but had similar beginnings in which I investigated patters of land management and the jarring (albeit beautiful) effect it has on the lakebed and neighbouring mountain range”.