Departing sharply from the fashion photography for which he is known, Chris Nicholls has created a series of large format images: a study of the highway rock cuts of Northern Ontario. Considered from a temporal perspective, these images remind us that even stone – our exemplar for the permanent, the inflexible – melts, bends, folds and stretches, forged over millennia by gravity and fluid rock well below the earth’s surface. Nicholls reveals the texture, graphic quality, and sheer imposing mass of these monolithic rock walls – the oldest objects on earth – through a uniquely contemporary lens.
Artist Statement
As a child, I often broke open rocks, looking for fossils. Touching and smelling the newly-exposed stone, l’d marvel at the fact that this surface in my hand hadn’t seen sunshine or air in hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years. Later in life, as I drove north in Ontario through the massive rock cuts made to level the land, I began to see these passageways created for our convenience as lenses into a fascinating story. In order to get faster to where we’re going, we have blasted and cut cross-sections through an imponderable expanse of geologic time.
When I began stopping on the road, trying to document these cuts with my camera, I was firmly told by the highway police that this was both dangerous and illegal. So, I costumed myself as a highway surveyor with pylons, a hard hat, and head to toe Hi-Vis fluorescent orange safety gear. The disguise enabled me to take the time to properly document the strange fact that on the highway we are traveling at kilometres per hour, through material laid down in millimetres per century. I found myself running dangerously from shoulder to median and back on busy highways, trying to find the perfect perspective from which to capture photos of the geologic – the nearly timeless – laid bare by the impatiently human.
I am known as a fashion/portrait photographer and have spent the last 40 years in the Canadian fashion industry, photographing the world’s top models and celebrities. For four decades, the time scale that’s preoccupied me has been the fraction of a second. In these photographs, three time scales are effectively on display: the scale of the rock; that of the highway, twenty to sixty years; and that of the photographic image, the shortest glance, used to capture the other two, and to remind us that even stone, our exemplar for the inflexible, melts, bends, folds and stretches like saltwater taffy.
For this project, and in contrast to the work for which I’m primarily known, I’ve worked completely alone, in a landscape I’ve loved since I was a child. Inspired by Andreas Gursky, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and fellow Canadian Ed Burtynsky, among others, I’ve sought to document a Canadian landscape that is amongst the most beautiful in the world, but to see it in a new way. Caspar David Friedrich’s “The Sea of Ice” hangs in my mind as I take these photos, evoking the power and romantic beauty of solid forms.
I love the texture, the graphic quality, and the pure imposing mass of these rock walls. The oldest objects on earth, history on a planetary, even galactic scale, is exposed for us to see. Notice also the vertical stripes through many of these pictures: boreholes drilled for the dynamite that allowed us to see any of this, a human y-axis crossing the x-axis forged over millennia by gravity and fluid rock.
-Chris Nicholls
Chris Nicholls is well known for his fashion & beauty photography – both editorial and commercial – and celebrity portraiture. He is a three-time winner of ‘Photographer of the Year’ at the P&G Fashion and Beauty Awards and a recipient of the CAFA Image Maker of the Year Award. His upcoming solo-exhibition will the first presentation of his photographic work in a fine-art gallery context.
