Meet the Creatives of Bristol: Chloe Turvey
Posted on: 15 Jan 2018In our Meet the Creatives of Bristol series, we scout the city for locals who work in a variety of creative fields. Whether they are at the early stage of their career, or are well-established, they represent the artistic city that Bristol is; vibrant, diverse and inspiring.
This time we caught up with Chloe Turvey, a 21-year-old photographer based in the city.
Chloe recently graduated with a degree in photography. Following her life-long passion for it, ever since she discovered her Granddad’s cameras as a child. She would spend hours on end looking through family photo albums, fascinated by the pictures inside.
Years of studying the art of photography has taken her on a journey of experimentation, by using different styles and techniques. More recently, Chloe has discovered her love for landscape photography, leading her to explore many interesting locations. She enjoys walking by the coast and in the isolated large green spaces of hills and mountains.
“My favourite places to take photos are usually in remote, peaceful places. I enjoy capturing beautiful and sometimes dramatic landscapes.”
Her latest work visits locations in the South West, including Somerset, Dorset and Cornwall. She has also recently visited Mount Snowdon in Wales and Kerry in Ireland.
Chloe’s photographs depict perfectly, the undisturbed atmosphere of the wilderness. Capturing vast scenes of mountains, hills and the coast, they stand as a tranquil yet intense moment within time. For Chloe, such landscapes provide her with a sense of peace, a minute away from the busy life of the city, and a form of escapism into something natural.
Chloe mainly shoots on 120 film with a medium format camera. She likes to experiment with alternative cameras as-well. For one of her projects she used a pinhole camera, which has no lens, just a tiny hole. This allows the light to come through and expose the film, meaning that the longer the light is left to expose, the more different the effects will be. One of the rarer effects of capturing motion can be seen in the tide moving in her pictures by the coast.
.jpg "Shot on film by Bristol-based photographer Chloe Turvey")
This technique creates a familiar yet strange aesthetic, the landscapes are recognisable but hold a different characteristic to them. The long exposures make what Chloe refers to as ‘quiet photography’, where the presence of the photographer themselves is not felt. Not only does this represent the displacement of human beings in large ecological settings, but it also reminds us that the natural world is both delicate and powerful at once.
“Lots of different photographers influence and inspire me. I am particularly fond of the work of Awoiska Van Der Molen, her series Sequester. Awoishka’s images are captured in single exposures of up to half an hour, then printed in her darkroom on large format, silver gelatin paper. The methodology is old-fashioned, and the results are extraordinarily powerful. They are rigorously crafted observations of natural landscapes -earth, stone, water, air, trees- taking time to render them with all their subtleties and eerie familiarity. Another one of my favourite photographers is called Darren Almond who has been making a series of landscape photographs known as Fullmoon. Taken in Patagonia and Cape Verde, Almond shot by the light of a full moon. He stood by his camera waiting for clouds to clear, then used long exposures of between 12 and 30 minutes. The results are both natural and unearthly, recognisable and oddly alien. They are bathed in an unexpectedly brilliant light where night seems to have been turned into day.”
Chloe’s work is a fusion of the natural and the sublime, her pictures hold an ethereal quality to them - something that is truly captivating to look at.
Check out Chloe's website here
***If you are a Bristol creative and are interested in being featured, contact hannah@365bristol.com***
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Article by:
Hannah recently graduated with a degree in English with Writing. She is an avid writer, freelancer and creative. She is currently writing her first full-length novel and a collection of poetry. Always out and about in Bristol's music scene, she attends music events on a weekly basis.
