“The worst most hungry time is the rainy season which is now coming on.”
Strange land is the first of two series that Shayne Higson produced while living in the Torres Strait during the early 1990s. The series is based on the story of a young Scottish girl, Barbara Thompson, who was the sole survivor of a shipwreck in the Torres Strait in 1844. She lived on the island of Muralag for five years before being rescued. While living in the Torres Strait herself, Higson imagined being in the same situation and took photographs that resonate with the girl’s account of being adrift in a ‘strange land’. The heavily printed photographs capture dream-like images of the tropical environment and are inscribed with fragments of text taken from Barbara Thompson’s story as well as indigenous myths about the island’s history.
(2015)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
