EXHIBITION / ARDDANGOSFA
mehefin / june 2025
PENRALLT gallery bookshop
peter cattrell
pattern occurRing - photographing mid-wales’ landscapes
contact sheet - above Machynlleth: Peter Cattrell
“I see the world in colour, but think of it photographically in the abstraction of black and white.”
Peter Cattrell is best known for his photography on what were once the French battlefields of the First World War, work he carried out over a period of 8 years, but he has also photographed the landscapes of Britain for over 40 years, mainly in Scotland and England.
Because of his connection with Fay Godwin, having printed for her in the 1980s and 1990s, he became involved in our efforts to make her work available once again to the viewing public in 2017 and he contributed to the development of the project as well as making the prints for the ensuing exhibition, “Under Turbulent Skies”.
While in Wales he began to photograph the landscape here too, initially areas around Machynlleth within walking distance, but also subsequently Borth/ Ynyslas and Cader Idris, using Machynlleth as his base on several visits during time off from his teaching photography at St. Martin’s in London.
Peter often uses his camera to record both human-made and naturally-occurring pattern within the landscape, creating semi-abstract, “flattened” images that accentuate the visual relationship between areas of land, hedgerows, rocks and trees. At the same time, he is also drawn to truly flat surfaces, such as rock, sand and water to create similarly abstract effects.
This avoidance of trying to create the illusion of depth in his photographs is unusual in landscape photography where wider lenses are commonly used to portray vastness of space and depth, in an attempt to mimick the wideness of human vision. But it does, at the same time, reflect our tendency to “zoom in” to sections of the landscape in order to make fuller sense of what we’re looking at.
The development of this approach over a 40 year span has enabled Peter to produce a body of work that is quite unconventional and yet he has always used film, applying the zone system and is acknowledged as a fine printer.