During lockdown, with no people to photograph and nowhere to go, time was spent in the garden and with my thoughts. Meditating on nature, watching the bees buzzing, the blossom blossoming and the grass growing, I began to see things differently. Seeing this state of lockdown as a metaphorical hibernation, a time to go within, nourishing the self from the inside.
Seeing the flowers bloom, from the months of inner work, seeing this as the 'trophy' I realise it is not the culmination of the project, the gold medal on race day, for it is all that came before, the foundations, that make it possible
Richard Pilnick works with photography as a way of seeing, not only the world in front of the lens, but the interior landscape we carry within. His portraits and studies of people are less about capturing an image and more about entering a conversation: a threshold between self and other.
Over twenty-five years he has photographed across four continents, from mountain communities in the Himalayas to concrete plants in Luxembourg, from hotel rooms in Vienna and San Francisco to fishing villages in southern India.