Essay for UK-based fine art photographer Darren Nisbett
Based in Bristol, England, Darren Nisbett attracted international media interest for his series of photographs taken in Pripyat, the Soviet-era city abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear accident. For Nisbett’s new work, BCreative sharpened the meaning behind his plaintive, poetic scenes of everyday ruins.
What is it about derelict buildings and deserted places that attract some people. They get lured in by absence and emptiness often looking for a cheap thrill. An adrenaline rush of danger. The connection is often more visceral than poignant. Darren Nisbett comes upon these places with a more purposeful intent and finds them still fertile with creative possibilities. He spies the heart in them in unexpected ways.
Nisbett’s photographs certainly betray an adventurous spirit willing to kick around in rough corners. But he also sensitively marks these scenes with an elegiac grit. The light falls gracefully. The mood is contemplative. The opportunity for meaning very personal. Nisbett represents more than merely what he found. The photographs are an evocation of the experience of loss and memory and making sense of our place in an ecological system forever changing, with or without us.
There is an odd chill that clings to many of Nisbett’s scenes, a mournful air that can be unsettling at first. His collection of photographs documenting the state of the area around the Chernobyl nuclear plant 25 years after its devastating accident are disquieting. Not a living person in sight. The image feels stark, isolating, otherworldy. But then you notice the trees blooming and all the organic life filling up the frame and the meaning and mood of the image shifts. The loss of what was once here is diminished by the beauty of what is coming. Nisbett has made deft use of the metaphorical value of these places.
Nisbett’s work in Archeology is another treasure hunt for meaning among places now lost to the outside world. We are often blind to the fragile beauty in the archeological ruins of everyday lives. The lingering value in what gets left behind. His image “TV Set” is sorrowful but resilient – the now three-legged sputnik-era tv set looks like the last sentinel of a less ostentatious age. So much in Nisbett’s view feels stalwart. These things, like memory itself, endures.
Still for all his range and roving, Nisbett’s photographs are personal as much as archival. Lyrical psychodramas that let him eulogize loss and celebrate the stubborn endurance of memory. In these rooms, these chairs the full frame of a life once fit. Something of their inner mystery remains and Nisbett sensitively imparts that value into the image. Nature will claim it all back in the end but for this moment, these places still have cultural significance and metaphorical depth. In “Fire and Ice”, down that long corridor – now completely empty and sooted and worn – the blue winter light still blooms like a spectral force, an incarnation. And at the distant end of this stretched out passageway, the door is open and the light radiant.
