Power of Photography Award 2006
From Amateur Photographer - 25 February 2006
Citation for Joe Cornish
The recipient of this year's Power of Photography Award is one of the finest landscape photographers working today. His work is also a huge and lasting inspiration to our readers.
Joe Cornish was an art student and a photographer's assistant before becoming a full-time photographer in 1985. He worked as a travel photographer for ten years, but after moving to North Yorkshire in 1993 he concentrated entirely on landscape photography. He published his first book, entitled "First Light", in 2002. It was a culmination of five years of large-format photography in wild and untamed landscapes, both in the UK and abroad. Since then he has published a second book, Scotland's Coast.
As well as shooting remote landscapes, Joe is currently the first-choice photographer for the National Trust. His sensitivity to the shape and form of a landscape, his dramatic use of light and his technical excellence have helped him produce a remarkable and ever- expanding body of work. It includes breathtaking images captured in locations as diverse as Alaska, Arizona, Tuscany and Tasmania. However, most of his work is shot around Northeast England, Cumbria and Scotland. He says: "Britain is one of the world's best destinations for photography. We have some of the most spectacular coastline on earth, and that coastline remains my greatest source of inspiration."
Joe's distinctive style not only brings less familiar landscapes to our attention, but also gives fresh life to those places photographed more often. Of his photography he has said: "I strive to make my interpretations of the landscape as natural as possible, yet dramatic enough to be interesting. I want the landscape to speak through the photographs or, seen in another way, I see the pictures as a window on the world - a frame through which the imagination can step and take a walk. Ultimately, they are my attempt to celebrate and honour nature's beauty,"