Captured With The Camera Book Review
Thomas Palfy's Photojournal From Australia, Europe, and The USA
Oct 28, 2009
Captured With The Camera is Australian photographer, Thomas Palfy's most personal effort to date. Captured is comprised of six albums that shed light on other aspects of his life. With pictures ranging from Palfy’s wife and daughter and members of the immediate family to abstract aqueous reflections and digitally altered portraits and landscapes, one familiar with Palfy’s work will surely take note of the new dimensions.
Palfy's Friends and Family
Captured’s first album, a collection of family portraits features a variety of close-ups and tightly framed shots of Palfy’s wife, daughter and other faces who have been immortalized by the photographer’s hungry lens. In this album, Palfy experiments with different background lighting as well as post-production techniques using Photoshop and Corel.
Australian Plants and Animals
As an avid nature lover, Palfy devotes a large section of his book to the flora and fauna of Australia. Colorful species of ocellated orchids, bloodthirsty fly-traps, mutant kangaroo paws like Christmas decorations as well as detailed attention to creatures like the hirsute huntsman spiders, who resemble surly octocular curmudgeons patiently stalking their next meal fill the pages of his albums.
Other interesting creatures come to life upon his pages. Turquoise crocodiles wear devious smirks on their knobby heart-shaped heads and the hemoglobin-hued abdomen of an idling dragonfly defies gravity as it clings to a thin reed in the foreground of a rocky landscape.
European and North American Travels
Palfy also includes, for the first time in his published work, documentation of his travels abroad. Lava beds in Hawaii pass as mottled elephant hides and on the Canadian border, the mighty Niagara river is a fierce and relentless surge of liquid jade and frost and ice.
Across the pond, Palfy visits Padova and the waterways of Brugge before returning to his native Hungary. A vista from atop the giant anachronous Ferris wheel in Vienna portrays a stark contrast between the crimson roofs of old town and the gleaming glass and steel of the modern angular skyscrapers rising out of the cobalt horizon.
Abstract and Experimental Photography
Captured’s sixth and final album is comprised of miscellaneous shots that flirt with the experimental. Again, Palfy dabbles with digital and computer enhancement, morphing some of his photos into oil paintings or drawings or fragmented portraits.
In Chicago, distorted pairs of parallel lines squirm on the side of a building and finally, upon returning home, Palfy captures a wishbone cloud formation dissipating out of a dark foreboding nebula hanging over a lonely bridge. As in other Palfy books, there is much natural beauty to behold and the vast wilderness that he calls home is indefatigable when called to play the part of the muse.
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