The sublime has many meanings, including danger viewed from a safe place.
Taking this as their theme, these cinematic images form a loose narrative based on the idea of a journey across a landscape at night. I wanted to allow the viewer the space to create their own tale around the pictures, since a sense of fear develops from the story of what might happen.
The photographs were all taken on the Ashdown Forest at night. Details were "light painted" in with a torch during long exposures, sometimes of several minutes. Ambient lighting for the scene was often provided by car headlights, a haphazard process involving much trial and error. Where it proved impossible to capture both detail and scene in a single shot, multiple exposures were made and combined in post production.
The red "sunset" in two of the pictures only occurred on one of the nights I was out shooting, and is I think a fortuitous mixture of a long exposure, atmospheric conditions and light pollution.
While the viewer is left to interpret the images as they will, the background to many of these places is the second world war. "Tree and Moon" is in fact a picture of The Airmen's Grave, a memorial erected by a mother to her son Vic Sutton and his crew who crashed and died returning from their 13th Wellington bomber mission on the night of 31st July 1941. Somewhat poignantly the monument is lit from behind the ridge line by the lights of the village of Nutley. It is possible the plane grounded here trying to avoid the settlement.
The "Isolation Hut" was, I believe, used to store ammunition on the WWII army camp, away from the soldiers' quarters in case of accidents or bombs. In fact it is thought that a bomb did land not far away behind the "Steps", since nothing else is left here but a depression in the ground. The "Fence" surrounds 80 acres that in 1942 housed the Aspidistra, the world's most powerful radio transmitter. In the 1980s a nuclear bunker was installed as an emergency Regional Seat of Government. Since 1994 the area has been used by Sussex Police as a training ground.