Nathaniel Maddison

United States of America

Nathaniel Maddison is a Vermont-based photographer and videographer. He uses chronophotography to trace the dance created by the flight patterns of birds and insects that join his sunrise yoga practice, layered against his own movement. He came to the technique somewhat by accident: doing yoga outdoors, he noticed birds repeatedly drifting into the background of his shots, and began layering the two together. His influences reach back to the roots of the medium in Muybridge's early motion studies, as well as multi-armed depictions of Hindu deities and the work of Spanish photographer Xavi Bou, both of which shaped his interest in rendering movement as a single, layered form. The resulting work reads as a kind of spiritual awakening, a visual representation of what Thich Nhat Hanh called interbeing: the idea that nothing exists independently, that everything, a star, a cloud, a flower, a person, relies on everything else to manifest.

Maddison has spent years living something close to a hermit's life, keeping his distance from people and instead keeping company with animals, whose consciousness he finds closer to the truth of interbeing than a culture that has grown disconnected from it. More recently, the level of crisis in his country has drawn him out of that solitude and into work that includes people directly, leading him toward citizen journalism and documentary photography. This shift has also opened a new technical direction: an emerging use of datamoshing to meld crowds of people into colorful, pulsating rivers of energy, extending his exploration of interbeing from the natural world into the human one.

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