Photograph by Rick Guest. Image courtesy of East Photographic.

 

Light is consistently the most intentional and care-given aspect of each photograph that British photographer Rick Guest takes. Car manufacturers like Bentley and Ferrari have hired Guest to photograph their shiniest new models within arrays of beams and grids of colored light. Canon practically hires him just to experiment with new methods using their products, like for his recent shots of seemingly holographic planes of light suspended within a empty warehouse.

Even Guest’s portraits show a conscious regard for how light and shadows hit their subjects; photos he took of professional ballet dancers for his series “Language of the Soul” experiment with varied light sources that, according to the series’ description, are meant to “enhance each dancer’s power and beauty, both physical and emotional.”

Therefore it’s no surprise that the following brief description accompanies Guest’s most recent series “Americana:” “California light, there’s nothing like it. These were all decisive moments whilst adrift in a sea of indecision.” Viewers don’t need to know anything but these two sentences to understand the work and its importance. What struck Guest about California as the Brit traveled through the state was its unique light; using carefully crafted technique, developed over his decades-long career, Guest astutely presents to the viewer exactly what he saw basked in that golden light that shines down on the Golden State.

In one of the most striking photos of the series, an orange horse stands against a backdrop – possibly a water tank – whose upper half is painted almost the same orange color as the horse’s hide. The slightly off-kilter composition puts these colors, and their objects, situated in muted natural light yet illuminated by their own colors, in focus; cut off are the horse’s hooves and its backside, but that doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is that the ground is also almost as orange as the horse, and that the sparse green weeds growing out of it and the beige stucco house in the background diversify the image just enough for it to be enjoyably and magnificently orange.

What isn’t seeped in orange has a distinct red tint or features a richly blue sky. It’s a departure for Guest, whose work can almost always be described as sleek. He’s left the blank canvas of a studio to explore unfamiliar terrain, to photograph less intentionally crafted subjects than in any other personal photo series Guest has previously completed.

 

Photograph by Rick Guest. Image courtesy of East Photographic.

 

“Americana” seems to have been inspired by the new style of documentary photography practiced primarily by twenty-somethings who started out by shooting on their parents’ 1980s film cameras and attempt to bring that antiquated style to their digital work. The series borrows the oversaturation and fascination with that which is old and decrepit that this era’s up-and-comers like Harley Weir have perfected. Whether or not that inspiration was conscious remains to be known.

In this respect, what Guest has done is not as original as it may seem in contrast to his own body of work. Many photographers have captured the landscape of the American West or perfected the make-old-look-new method that Guest tests out here. But what is valuable is the way Guest takes these overused concepts and, by filtering them through his own British sensibilities and finely honed craft, creates images that can feel fresh and new – especially in their treatment of light. The crispness of his GQ cover portraits have given way to a more natural study of the element.

The few people featured in “Americana” act as purveyors of those bright colors and as momentary breaks from the largely inanimate focus. To a born-and-bred Brit, these beat-up pickup trucks, desert plains, and industrial landscapes probably struck the photographer as foreign, like the realization of a myth featured in American movies set in the West (or at least the West that low- and middle-class Americans know well).

This California scenery must have been as refreshing to Guest as this series is to people familiar with the more sterile work he usually churns out. “Americana” serves to reassure viewers that Guest isn’t solely an artist trained to serve the advertising world, but that he has a more original viewpoint than those commissioned projects allow. It may even prove that this relatively old dog has begun to learn some new aesthetic tricks.

 

Photograph by Rick Guest. Image courtesy of East Photographic.