Dominic Pote paints with light. His materials may be those of the photographer but his eye is that of an expressionist painter and his sensibility one of a poet. Cartier-Bresson talked of the photograph’s ‘decisive moment’, that potent instant frozen forever within a single frame. But Pote, without the aid of a digital camera or other technological devises, creates images that suggest the actual experience of time. Hazy and dreamlike his photographs imitate the process of memory itself. His subjects are seascapes, architecture and landscape for he is attracted to the point where places meet; the city and the skyline, the shoreline and the sea.
His camera is hand-held in line with his body. Often he does not look through it with his eye but starts on his knees or crawls in order to catch a building or a view from a particular angle. Working somewhere between the film maker and the still photographer his exposures last as long as he keeps moving. Many of his photographs are two or three meters in length. Framed by the physical act of walking his images are both literal and metaphorical journeys, movements through space so that there remains something of the organic feel of their making.
Movement, flux and transformation are the basis of his aesthetic and his philosophical concerns. Light bleaches out and erases detail so that sky, water, sea and buildings bleed into each other and boundary definitions become ambiguous, whether he is photographing the constantly changing shoreline of the volcanic Greek island of Milos or the landmark buildings of the city of London such as St. Paul’s Cathedral or Canary Wharf. His frontiers are both actual places and utopian visions. As with the great German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, with his infinite stretches of sea and mountains or his fog-bound plains painted at sunrise or by moonlight, Pote suggests the underlining spiritual significance of the landscape and the redemptive possibilities of the sublime.