Street Art: George Byrne - Harper's BAZAAR November 2021

Photographer GEORGE BYRNE recently closed the book, literally, on the first stage of his artistic career. He talks to Alexandra English about phainting (that’s photo-painting), self-publishing in a pandemic and creating an abstract utopia

Where most people would stop in their tracks to take a photo of a spectacular sunset, George Byrne is more likely to pull over on the side of the road to take a photo of a shadow in a car park. It’s the banality of the everyday that appeals to this artist. The places and things we pass on our daily routes tend to become invisible through repetition; rarely do we stop to appreciate the beauty of derelict buildings or cracked pavements. Byrne is different. The Australian-born, Los Angeles-based photographer has built his whole artistic practice on strolling the streets of the sprawling city with medium-format film and digital cameras, seeking out mundane surfaces, muted colours and faded textures. Once he’s amassed a collection of images, he splices them together into fictional cityscapes that are at once eerie and utopic in their humanlessness.

Of course, this is how our cities have looked now for the better part of two years. Byrne is aware of the irony that the pandemic that emptied the streets was also what gave him the time to compile his images into a coffee table book. Titled Post Truth, it features 57 works that demonstrate the evolution of his art from “straight colour landscape photography, which progressively shifted into more experimental, manipulated imagery”. His painterly photographic aesthetic earned its own portmanteau, phainting, which, he says laughing, hasn’t really caught on. Jeffrey Smart and David Hockney are inspirations. “They always had a sort of tension and absence in their works,” Byrne says. “They’re masters of composition, and I do spend a lot of time on that.”

Byrne studied fine arts and exhibited photography in his twenties before taking a long break. In his thirties, he moved to LA and came back to photography with renewed focus. “I was so enamoured with the landscape of Los Angeles, I thought it was just unbelievable — I hadn’t seen anything like it,” he recalls. “The work I started shooting there was more of what you’d call new topographic-inspired documentary photography — looking at urban spaces but not meddling with them.

“I’ve been exhibiting the work over and over in multiple galleries. Last year allowed me to pull up the handbrake and re-evaluate what I’d done and throw it in a book,” he continues. “Making Post Truth gave me something to focus on and gave me a sense of closure of that period.”

Now, he’s on a new creative path: pure abstraction. “The pandemic inadvertently helped me really embrace the idea of slowing down and going back through what I’d shot but never used and coming up with interesting reinterpretations of what I already had,” he explains. “My process was already leaning towards this idea of photography melding into abstraction, so I thought I should at least try to see how they work as pure abstraction.”

The result is an exhibition titled Innervisions, to be held at Olsen Gallery in Sydney from late October. “These works are distinct from anything I’ve ever done before,” he says. “There is no hint of them being a conventional landscape of any sort. Obviously, I was in a different headspace when I was making this show, and what stood out to me was this sense of seamless dreamscapes. They have an escapist feel — they’re almost utopic and idealistic. Maybe I was communicating that from the headspace I was in. I’m not a highly spiritual person, but I do think there was some sort of subconscious narrative going on. I was obviously very stuck, like everyone else, but I had this creative outlet that I was very deep into, and I think that comes across in the general mood of the show.”

Byrne is talking over the phone from Montreal, Canada, hoping that he can get back to Sydney in time to set up the exhibition. “I want to get there two weeks early to go to the printer and the framer — I love all that post-production,” he says. “I might work in a medium that parallels painting, but the big difference is that I don’t get to live with my images on any scale until they’re up on the wall. It’s really exciting to me to see them up because that’s how they’re supposed to be: completely immersive.”

This article originally appeared in the November 2021 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.