Gary Nicholls Imaginarium
About the work
I don’t photograph scenes. I build them.
Every image on this site started as a picture in my head that didn’t exist anywhere I could point a camera. So I go and photograph the pieces — a figure here, a building there, a sky from somewhere else entirely, sometimes years apart and continents apart — and then I spend weeks in Photoshop persuading them they belong in the same world.
That is what conceptual photographic art means when I use the phrase. Not a filter over a photograph. A composite built element by element until it holds together and stops looking assembled.
Every photograph in every piece is mine. Nothing on this site is AI-generated and nothing is bought in from a stock library. If there is a raven in an image, I went and photographed a raven. It is slower, and it is the whole point.
Where it started
My father taught me to draw before I could do much else, and had me in galleries from the age of eight. What caught me even then was that somebody had made this out of nothing but imagination. I worked through oils, watercolour, then pen and ink.
The camera came later, and for a long time it felt like the wrong tool. Cameras record what is in front of them, and what was in front of me was never the thing I wanted. Digital changed that. Between a camera and Photoshop I finally had a way to draw again, using photographs as the pigment.
Light does the storytelling
Everyone’s eye is tuned to something. Some people see colour, some see form. For me it has always been light.
Caravaggio worked out four hundred years ago that if you control where the light falls you control where the viewer looks, and more than that, how they feel about what they are looking at. He built whole narratives from a single raking light and a great deal of darkness. Vermeer treated light almost as a physical substance, something with weight, sitting in a room. Both are in everything I make.
H R Giger pulls in the opposite direction, and I need that too — the reminder that unsettling is a perfectly legitimate thing for a picture to be. And Dalí for the simplest and most useful idea of the lot: if you can imagine it, you can make it.
What I photograph
People, mostly. Not portraits — people mid-scene, caught in the middle of something you have arrived too late to understand. I want you to look at an image and start inventing the story either side of it.
The work tends dark, and towards fairy tale and steampunk, because those are the places where the ordinary rules are already suspended and nobody objects to a woman standing calmly in a waterfall or a house drifting past a window.
Why metal, and not paper
This part is technical, but it is the difference between seeing the work in a photograph of it and seeing it in a room.
The luminosity in Caravaggio’s paintings comes from thin layers of paint built over each other, so light travels into the surface and back out again. A print on paper cannot do that. The ink sits on top and the light stops there.
ChromaLuxe metal panels get much closer. The dyes are infused into the coating on the aluminium rather than laid onto it, so light enters the surface before it returns to you. The result has a depth and a glow paper never achieves, the colours hold for decades, and the panel will outlast all of us. It is also why these are heavy, awkward, expensive things to make and ship — and worth it.
Editions
Everything is a strictly limited edition, usually seven pieces worldwide and sometimes fewer. Each is signed, numbered and certificated. When an edition is finished it is finished. I don’t reprint, and I don’t quietly re-release the same image at a different size to get around my own rule.