'Palm Baum'
It could be said that this series of photographs It arose from the boredom of always seeing the same thing, from having lost the ability to be surprised by what was around him and that long ago had been a source of inspiration and, above all, from the determination of photographer Kate Ballis not to lose interest in the one who had been her muse for so long, Palm Springs (California).
“Palm Springs has been my muse and second home for seven years,” the Melbourne-based photographer tells Traveler.es. “I wanted to go there because of the photos of Slim Aarons and William Eggleston. In 2013, when I was flying to Cuba with a layover in Los Angeles, I planned a two-day layover in Palm Springs. I completely fell in love with that mountainous background, the mid-century architecture and the landscape.”
'Sands'
However, Ballis's love broke from photographing her so much and, in an attempt not to lose her muse, she learned another way of looking at her. It was not from one day to the next, she had to experiment, play to create scenes that lead to ambiguity and confusion, and dare to use the infrared technique in an unorthodox way.
“Unlike other photographers who use infrared to capture scenes more naturally, I have turned this technique on its head to create a palette that contrasts with what is expected of Palm Springs.” she writes her on her website.
“Many of the houses are painted in muted colors that blend in with the desert landscape (…); most of the houses use for their gardens succulents that bloom with the heat, palm trees, synthetic grass, olive trees, fuchsia-colored bougainvillea... Apart from bougainvillea, colors tend to be muted earthy and greenish tones against a deep blue sky. My colors are completely different from that.”
And it is that in the series of photographs of her, Infra Realism , Ballis stains fuchsia pink this landscape tending towards monotony.
'fortune'
Monotony is not a word that sticks with this photographer who, with her work, tries to capture what we are not able to appreciate with the naked eye and to show us the places she visits in a different way than what we have in mind.
“I decided to use infrared photography in Palm Springs because this technique shows how plants carry out their photosynthesis process and how seemingly dry, brownish desert succulents and palms actually flourish, even in 50-degree heat.” Make visible the life in which we do not usually notice and take a look at those landscapes that we no longer perceive so often.
Thus, in Infra Realism , the water of the pure fuchsia pools almost touches the red, the leaves of the trees flirt with blue, the pastel pink outshines the brown and the purple adds a breaking point to so many pinkish palette and, why not, of freshness to those overexposed whites that show that the sun in Palm Springs scorches. And no, no trace of people, as if it were a pink power apocalypse.
"I like that people can project their own surreal dreams onto my images and that there are people in the photograph, usually links them to planet Earth. Also, to be honest people don't emit infrared light and, when combined with the filters I use, they do not usually come out very favored”, says Ballis who, after three years shaping this series, has learned something about infrared digital technique.
Because Infra Realism, which began in 2017, is a living project that has brought Ballis not only to photograph every corner of Palm Springs, but also Joshua Tree, Sedona (Arizona) and Atacama (Chile). From all this work came a homonymous book "and several exhibitions around the world."
'Goddess'