keith
ABOUT
Keith Prue’s photographs contain wit, irony and his British sense of humor, challenging us to look at fleeting moments of wonder through the simple pleasure of seeing. His subjects are predominantly people or the natural world, although he is also fascinated with urban infrastructure. He often presents multiple adjacent images in a frame, for visual impact or to draw contextual comparison, and from living and working on four continents and visiting more than fifty countries, he explores and contrasts cultural nuances.
Keith is a substantially self-taught artist, attending workshops in the USA and overseas with internationally acclaimed master photographer Ernesto Bazan, and studying for two years with the late Ben Lifson, one of the world’s most prominent photography writers and critics. Exhibiting online and showing in group exhibitions in the USA and Mexico, his photographs are held in private collections in the USA, Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, UK and France. Keith is an Exhibiting Member of the RI Center for Photographic Arts, and an Elected Artist and former board member of Art League RI.
STATEMENT
My art is an escape into a different place of being. It’s very much a meditative experience for me and enables me to detach and view the world as a passive witness. The message in my work is to take time to stop, to look, to see—to really see. Therefore, my website is called one seeing, as a reference to both me seeing (the individual one), but also to consciousness seeing (the collective oneness). Ultimately, they are one and the same—so when someone looks at one of my pictures and sees what I saw, there is a profound connection on a deep level.
I very much like the way Bill Brandt explained it “We look at a thing and believe we have seen it. And yet what we see is often only what our prejudices tell us to expect to see, or what our past experiences tell us should be seen, or what our desires want to see. Very rarely are we able to free our minds of thoughts and emotions and just see for the simple pleasure of seeing. And so long as we fail to do this, so long will the essence of things be hidden from us.”