About
A description of my work by Britart Eyestorm:
The landscape of consumer society is full of hi-tech environments, precisely designed to prime us for the excess of information, entertainment and the endless opportunities for individual satisfaction.
Award-winning photographer John Morrison’s remarkable photographs present us with the pristine, machine-like spaces of commercial culture with hallucinatory precision. Exaggerated perspectives of interior design that vanish into the distance, consoles and seating ready for use, Morrison’s pictures pull back from the content of modern culture to focus on the form of its delivery.
Everywhere you turn in Morrison’s world you notice that screens have turned blank; the video monitor, the computer display, the cinema screen or advertising panels in the underground are empty of the web pages, in-flight movies, commercials, and pop promos we expect.
And this absence is repeated in the empty spaces that should be full of people, revealing a strangely purified world where the structure of what we experience becomes the subject.
Morrison’s images are brilliantly seductive, yet by glamorising their subjects, they also subtly undermine the easy charms of the digital culture that surrounds us, giving us a space in which to stand back and observe the saturated surface of the information economy.
Like all good art, his images allow us to gain a new perspective on familiar things. Using the experience of a photograph, Morrison reminds us of all the time we spend amongst the Internet cafes, airports, undergrounds and fitness clubs, and how good it is to look at something different, once in a while. Britart.
Pursuing other interests in design and education over the past ten years has meant not much time for personal photography projects. However, my new job as a lecturer Edinburgh Napier University has inspired me to start realising some of the many ideas, which have been filling my sketchbook.
Can see myself investing in one of www.stills.org new, excellent value month passes, for using their darkrooms and digital production facilities. (Good one Evan :)
This site contains only my own work, by its nature Tumblr is a social platform and I am happy for users to re-post. However please respect my copyright and include attribution when sharing photographs and posts.
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Torsten Grewe (2012) Berlin.
From a series titled ‘Unarmed’. Although not visible in the final Photograph, the sitter is holding a cable release and decides the moment the shutter is fired. Democratising the power which normally belongs exclusively to the photographer.
© John L Morrison
Torsten Grewe, Contact Sheet (2012) Berlin. © John L Morrison
Triptych. Shanghai, China.
© John L Morrison
While in New York for a study of advertising and signage, I also became interested in architecture and how it may reflect economic and political ideologies. I continued this study in China, while trying to maintain some visual continuity - shooting from the same steep perspective, directly in front of the structures.
I took these images with a Mamyia 7 II medium format rangefinder camera and a 65 mm lens. To get the whole buildings in shot, I was lying on the ground with a very small travel tripod. With the Mao Tower photograph it was 10:30pm and due to my f22 aperture the exposure was about 4 mins. A guy fascinated by what I was up to observed my every move for the whole duration of the exposure. His close proximity made me feel quite uncomfortable. However, Soon as I stood up he took a remote control out of his pocket and in a flash turned off all the lights in the entire tower!
Other posts on China
Hovercraft. Hong Kong, China.
© John L Morrison
Underground. From the series Adrift in Capitalism
© John L Morrison
5x4 Fuji NPL
Part of a series exploring the ubiquitous and pervasive presence of advertisements and their influences and interactions with architecture.
Focusing on seeing adverts in the everyday spaces I take for granted became a kind of obsession. I wanted to communicated these in a way that borrowed from the vocabularies, seductions and delivery methods of the ads themselves.
Using colour, symmetry and showcasing the works on light boxes all helped create a layer of abstraction allowing viewers to observe their everyday world from a different perspective, highlighting the saturated surface of the information economy.
It was not until after seeing the photographs on the wall and speaking with the external examiner at Edinburgh College of Art that I realised the significance of the architecture in these spaces. It was almost as if the structures were built to prime us for the excess of information and endless opportunities of individual satisfaction on their symmetrical walls.
The empty cinema image, took on significance for me as representing a place of worship for a new generation. A place which symbolises our love of our own enslavement -more a Huxley world than an Orwellian one. The latest type of social control, one that keeps us spiralling in desires, debt and more desires so we don’t concern ourselves with difficult questions, anaesthetised to what is truly important.
I was 20 years old when making these images and now more than 10 years later the naiveté of my ideas are a lot more apparent to me. However, I am not yet done with this project and although have become somewhat a victim of the Ikea nesting myself, discovering books like John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing has re-ignited a desire to make photographs true to the documentary spirit of visual communication.
Cinema and Airplane. From the series Adrift in Capitalism
© John L Morrison
5x4 Fuji NPL
Maxence Villien (2005) Polaroid.
© John L Morrison
5x4 Polaroid study
Using a Sinar 5x4 camera has its challenges but I personally loved seeing the world upside-down and back-to-front on the ground glass screen. This fresh perspective, enables a new way of seeing, allowing you to spot patterns invisible to the eye when everything is the right way round.
Mattias Fredrik Josefsson
© John L Morrison
5x4 Polaroid study
Mena Vieira © John L Morrison 5x4 Polaroid study
Damian Ucieda
© John L Morrison
5x4 Polaroid study
Julien Voisine
© John L Morrison
5x4 Polaroid study
Ahmed Burwaiss
© John L Morrison
6x6 Kodak Technical Pan 25
The superfine detail and rich contrast of this ISO 25 film is something I have not been able to recreate with digital cameras.
It is a sad reality that 10 years ago you could produce photographs which are technically superior than what is possible with todays digital cameras. I lament films which are no longer manufactured like Fuji’s amazing NPL. It produced exceptional colour and tonal detail in artificial lighting, even with exposures exceeding one hour.
Ahmed Burwaiss
© John L Morrison
6x6 Kodak Technical Pan 25
No Logo (2001) c-type. Times Square, New York, USA.
© John L Morrison
Visual study of advertisements in New York.
No Logo (2001) c-type. Times Square, New York, USA.
© John L Morrison
Visual study of advertisements in New York.
