The Art Gallery
Jean Miele
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For Jean Miele, photography is about capturing visions, a suggestive, even transcendent, moment that makes a powerful connection with the viewer’s imagination. Of his ongoing series, Landscapes of the Mind, he has written:
‘I make landscape photographs because they remind me of the images which linger from dreams. Their power lies in the ability to inspire a perfect, quiet, strong place within. They connect me to a higher, more conscious part of myself and I hope ... provide [viewers] with similar inspiration.’
The ‘perfect places’ of Miele’s finely crafted, highly stylized monochrome photographs have an established, international following. His work, which draws on influences as diverse as American master photographer Ansel Adams and ancient Japanese and Chinese ink paintings, is held in numerous private collections and has been shown in galleries from New York to Norway. ‘Classical Landscape Photography and the Digital Darkroom’, his solo exhibition of 28 large-scale, digitally-enhanced black-and-white landscape photographs at the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, was specially extended by popular demand. During its 12-month run it was seen be more than 100,000 visitors.
‘In terms of “output,” what matters to me most is making really beautiful prints. A strong image deserves to be printed as a perfect object: beautiful surface, rich tones, clean whites, deep blacks. I’m making the best prints I’ve ever made - and the hardware and the materials just keep getting better.
Innova is one of the companies that’s making this possible.
They’ve introduced some wonderful papers. I made all the prints for my exhibition in Oslo: “Seeing Is Believing” on Innova’s Fibaprint White Gloss paper. I just love it. It reminds me of the double-weight fibre-based gelatin-silver paper I used to favour – except the blacks are better.’
New technology is simply another strand of every photographer’s inheritance of and innovations to the history of photography as a fine art medium, says Miele. ‘Digital photographic prints, like those I choose to create and exhibit, are merely the latest in a long line of photographic printing processes. 19th-century salt prints, albumen prints, platinum prints and similar processes were all but replaced by silver prints during the 20th century.’