Travel by Night
There are bones in the alleyways of the night. They are illuminated by the bounced light and false colours of sodium vapor lamps. There are doorways that are wisely locked against the dark. There are scraps and relics in the narrow side streets of the city’s downtown. It is best to avoid the seldom seen back alley rituals of piss and mutilation.
So, I guess this picture deals with paranoia. It was cobbled together recently from scans, photographs and vector drawing. Some parts of it seem to emerge autonomously from the process of creation itself. There are lots of surprises in this business.
My name is Paul Saturley. I have been involved in analog and digital photography for almost forty years. It has been a constant companion. It has shown me many things I would otherwise have missed.
I live on Vancouver Island, on Canada’s West Coast. It can be a darkly inviting place. Perhaps it is the mild climate and moisture coupled with the unstable terra firma that gives it such appeal. There is a conventional beauty to the place as witnessed by tourist brochure photographs of blue waters and white ferries. But in the off-season, when the rains come and when the rest of Canada turns white, the mysterious character of these islands in the Salish Sea emerges. When new bright green velvet on the branches of Gary Oaks welcomes the approach of winter and the beaches grow mostly silent, the real character of the place emerges. It is fascinating to witness. It is like an open invitation to free the imagination from the lease of western civilization.
About this work.
There is a mix of work on this site. Most of it is driven, sometimes indirectly, by photography (all of which is original). In a computer it is possible to process photographic work in very unconventional ways — mixing it with scanned pieces, painting, illustration and type. Sometimes the end product is a long way from the original pixels. At that point the work becomes something else entirely and photography is only a means to an end. There is some of that on this site as well as more conventional, lens based photographic imagery.
Inkriver has been my web site for almost twenty number of years. It has lived in various corners of the Internet. For reasons that need not be explained here it currently resides on WordPress.
A note on copyright. All of the work on this site, including the bits and pieces of composited images, is original and is protected by copyright. If you are interested in using any of the work seen on inkriver please contact me first. You can use the form on the contact page.
