Murray Fredericks | Vanity Series

posted by Hannah Dawson May 18, 2017

Murray Fredericks is a photographer from Sydney, Australia and his work has continued to capture his prolonged solo journeys over the years in remote and extreme locations across the globe. Murray began by studying politics and economics at Sydney University before spending five years travelling in the Middle East and in the Himalaya. It was during this time and a result of everything he had experienced in such ‘powerful’ and difficult to reach locations which provided him with his approach and passion for photography.

The Vanity series is a collection of photographs, all of which feature a huge mirror and the breathtaking, calm, still salt lakes of Lake Eyre, we just could not believe that these images were real, and just had to find out more.

“Standing in the silken water, surrounded only by a boundless horizon, I sense a release, a surrendering as the self dissolves into the light and space.” – Murray Fredericks

‘In this series, Fredericks interrupts his endless and ethereal horizons for which he has become known through the intervention of mirrors. Rather than employing the mirror as a symbol of self-reflection, Fredericks redirects our gaze away from ourselves and into the immense environment. His translations of the landscape verge on otherworldly; mirrors oat gently like windows or portals, offering a dual experience of looking both into another realm and out, as the lake’s glass-like surface reflects an in nite space above.’

‘By removing our reflection from the picture entirely, Fredericks subtly questions the narcissistic qualities of the human condition in the age of the Anthropocene, wherein human activity has become the overriding force on climate and the natural world. He casts our image adrift, so that we might be consumed by the phenomena of light, colour and space on a visceral level, engaging another stratum of consciousness that echoes the artist’s own experience of living in solitude on the lake. In Vanity, Fredericks’ meditations on the immeasurable and unknown void that encompasses us offer a space in which to escape ourselves, and to pause in a moment of pure transcendence.’