CityLife

The fantastic fantasy world of Jamie Baldridge

ENGAGING: Jamie Baldridge's work 1 / 2 images

A PICTURE tells a thousand stories, but few tell them more vividly than Jamie Baldridge's photographs.

His show, Pilgrims and Peregrines, is a UK exclusive and showcases the American artist's unusual and wonderful photographic work.

An emerging photographer whose images retell fables he fell in love with when he found a storybook in his grandmother's attic, Jamie has brought over 30 examples of his work to Manchester, all limited editions personally printed and signed by the artist.

His work isn't, in the strictest sense of the work, just photography and any meaningful discussion of the images in his show would require the creation of a whole new language.

They're visually exquisite, but they also represent sheer technical wizardry; the practices involved are photography, digital manipulation and collage, and the results have a painterly lustre, depth and texture.

Working in this unique manner, Baldridge lifts textures, surfaces and details from a multitude of digital images.

Atmospheric qualities

Upwards of 20 different negatives can be rendered together using a 3D modelling programme to create a single finished image, and it's this that gives his images the depth, detail and atmospheric qualities that make them so remarkable.

Gallery owner, Richard Goodall first discovered Jamie when he saw his artists book, The Everywhere Chronicles, and felt compelled to seek the artist out.

Baldridge, Professor of photography and fine art at Louisiana State University, has been perfecting his technique for about eight years, and his photographic prints are truly phenomenal.

Drawing together recognisable iconography from mythology, fairy tales and religious dogma, Baldridge creates comtemporary images that are unsettling, and in many ways indefinable - there is a sense, for instance, that the narrative within these images is both secret and universal.

Victorianesque macabre

Despite their sepia tone, these images are suffused with a wonderful quality of light that lifts the work beyond the meticulous renderings of a steam-punk, Victorianesque macabre.

The work's charm, says Richard, is its depth. "I just love it. I think there’s a darkness to it, but I think there is a great humour to it as well.

"It’s like Jamie says, he likes people to read things in the images themselves and if somebody reads something which is better than he thought, then he’ll take that."

Heavy with significance but open to interpretation: Baldrige's 'photographs' are engaging and entrancing.

Pilgrims and Peregrines is at the Richard Goodall Gallery, 107 High Street, Manchester (0161 834 3330) until December 7.