Chasing the southern light

Chasing the Southern Light is a breath-stopping photographic tour of Southern New Zealand. Matheson Beaumont is to photography what Grahame Sydney is to painting: an artist who sculpts with light.As Reg Graham writes in his introduction,The lakes, the mountains, the riverbeds are his subjects, shown in all seasons, all lights, and always with an exact eye for composition and palette.For while Matheson Beaumont also captures the busy traffic of working lives - railway yards, coastal suburbs, fisherman’s wharves - the wide, open country of the south lures his gaze again and again. His gift is to show us not just the change from season to season, but also the number of moods of any one season. Sun, wind, rain, frost, snow, mist, fog, sun again: with each of the South’s rapid shifts in weather, another dimension of the land’s character emerges. From beachfront to rolling pasture, from autumn in the bush to the scene of a lakeside hoarfrost: every image is exquisitely framed. As with all the best travelogues, Beaumont’s images almost transport us into the land itself. Also included is an introduction written by Reg Graham and an essay by the ‘Landscape Guru’ himself: Beaumont’s essay covers his photographic career, associations with George Chance, Brian Brake, Ansel Adams and others, and ‘on landscape as subject’.