Background:

Boyle Family is a group of collaborative artists based in London. Mark Boyle and Joan Hills met in Harrogate, Yorkshire in 1957, Joan a single mother who had left her art and architecture studies to bring up her son and Mark was serving in the army. Within months they were collaborating, initially exhibiting their work under Boyle’s name until their work became widely known and they exhibited as Mark Boyle and Joan Hills. When their children, Sebastian born in 1962 and Georgia born in 1963, began to collaborate with them from the late 1970s onwards, the group became established as Boyle Family.

Best known for ‘earth’ photography, focusing on the different textures of the ground. These photographic works combine real material from the site they are using for the shoot (stones, dust, twigs etc) with paint and resins, preserving the form of the ground to make unique one-off pieces that suggest and offer new interpretations of the environment.

Photographic Analysis:

This style of image is a very unique way to show the journeys and pathways, as it not only shows the physical road/pavement that we walk on, but it also shows the history of the concrete, the paintwork, and cracked slabs on the pavement. It shows a different kind history that is so often overlooked. There are very distinguishable features in the textures which are amplified by the wet surface, helping show the more intricate details in the road, as well as creating more definition between cracks in the pavement.

In this photo you can see the light coming from the left side of the image. As there is only light coming in from one spot on the left, I would imagine that the light is artificial, however it could be the sun slightly shining through the clouds on an overcast day. Wherever the light source is coming from, it creates a very nice reflection that shows even more detail in the uneven surface of the road. Taken from standing height, I would imagine that the lens that Boyle used would have had a fairly ‘standard’ or ‘medium’ focal length for this picture, somewhere in the region of around 50-85mm.