The face of the land has been of absorbing interest to Steve Pyke, and it is a genre to which he has returned on many occasions.
It has been conventional for photographers working in black and white to expand the tonality of their images in representing landscape. Pyke’s approach runs totally counter to this tradition. It is distinctive and highly graphic: he reduces the land to a few shades of grey between the extremes of pure white and deepest black.
As in his other work, Pyke’s approach seeks to capture and order the land forms within his visual grasp. He wants to classify revealing aspects of human existence, to collect abandoned or forgotten cues to personality and culture: the shape of a field, the way a building copes with its location, the marks men and women have left upon the land they occupied
© Peter Hamilton.
