Noel Myles: joining at the edge

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Lindsey Shaw-Miller explores the work of a painter who has produced a major body of photographic images

Noel Myles describes his photographic prints as ‘still films’. A whole narrative time sequence is present in each image, stilled by the union of its composite parts. Landscape is his primary source, and he came to it from abstract painting some 30 years ago. His first principle was to expand the photographic medium outward from the static viewpoint, the single moment; instead, he layers timeframes and viewpoints, achieving unity from the collaged multiplicity of collected images.

The notion of joined photographs immediately brings to mind David Hockney’s ‘joiners’ of the early 1980s. In fact, Hockney sponsored a competition in 1987 at the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television, in which Myles won first prize for one of his massive 6ft x 4ft portraits, composed from over 500 images. Hockney’s willingness to engage his art with new technology and media, while remaining faithful to paint, is certainly an inspiration. But Myles’ work engages differently with time, and, although it is his retinal experience that we share, he does not register his presence in the image autobiographically.

In 1988 Myles bought a house in the Limousin and began a major landscape project which lasted three years, involving 12,000 photographs and 150 feet of pictures, some measuring 10ft x 4ft. Since then his work has refined and reduced in scale. Not a lot ‘happens’ in these images. Myles walks through a landscape taking photographs as he walks, sometimes repeating the walk over a series of weeks and months, registering shape and detail in different seasons and lights. Myles’ commitment is primarily to painting, and he sees his assemblages as photographic pictures rather than photographs. He defines his work as ‘composed in the studio, not in the camera’.

His technique is significant here. For monochrome images, he hand-coats fine paper with the precious metals platinum and palladium, composing and abutting negatives on a light-box. He then prints onto the sensitized paper, which lends them a tangible, tactile quality, and enhances their longevity and vitality. The colour compositions are made with small colour prints, developed at a professional colour lab (latterly from digital files), onto Kodak Endura paper. Selection and composition, in the studio, is at the heart of the process, and requires stringent discipline and a finely tuned eye. He doesn’t crop or cut, the ‘collage’ must work as a complete image with the component parts laid next to one another, not overlapping, simply joined. He has embraced digitization and the opportunities it affords, assembling digital files in Photoshop with perfect abutting.  The digital image is printed on a single sheet of photographic paper, at various sizes, enabling the stunning detail that a huge, combined file can achieve.

The pleasure in looking at these visually complex and captivating prints lies in their invitation to discover the landscape for yourself, experientially, detail by detail, and detail in relation to whole. He says:

These collages are not remote images. It is essential to understand that the viewer is taking an active role in constructing the image for him or herself when looking at it. He or she participates.

In using small frames of repetition and variation, Myles has, of course, entered into the current of postmodernism. His work relates to the music of Steve Reich, Philip Glass and La Monte Young, who use short musical phrases that repeat melodically and rhythmically, varying subtly and gradually; or the installations of the ceramicist Edmund de Waal, with his massed staves of pots, each formally similar but individually different. In concept, however, Myles’ work is a postmodern manifestation of Cubism, right down to the threshold between the process of abstraction and goal of representation. 

Just as Cubism set out to depict a variety of viewpoints and perspectives on one flat surface, it also conspired to counter the captured moment, to present an image that is neither timeless, nor time-locked. Myles explains:

Our perception of life is continuous. As we move our eyes over the environment we build and store mental, visual images of what we have just seen, linkedseamlessly with what we are looking at now. My question was how to represent this memory of looking and thinking in a still photograph.

This is just what the Cubists were trying to do with painting.

Depth is ambiguous in Myles’ work: different ranges coexist within the field. The assemblage encourages reading across the image, rather than into it, creating a different rendition of photographic space. The dialogue of looking between distance and detail, and between times, seasons and lights, is active meditation for the viewer. These are pictures to live with, to increase acquaintance over time: their combination of meditation and vibrancy, nature and technology, fast and slow in both image and medium, is too cleverly crafted, too well designed to tire the eye. Pace and texture are combined in a sensuous encounter that defies photography’s fleeting persona, gets under its skin to the nature at its image-source; becomes sexy.