For his most recent exhibition, Unfathomable – running from 2nd May to 27th June at Belfast Exposed – Goiris presents some of his most surreal and otherworldly work to date.
In ‘Three Suns’ we see an empty, snow-swept landscape with three suns spread across the horizon. But, despite what you may think, this is no fancy trick of the camera. “It’s a real phenomenon that I witnessed when I was in Antarctica,” he explains.
“The one in the middle is the real sun and left and right is – I think it’s called sundogs, a kind of optical phenomenon caused by light interacting with ice crystals in the sky. The atmosphere is acting like a lens.”
In the photographs exhibited, as with most of Goiris’s work, there’s a distinctive atmosphere that goes beyond simply documenting remote locations. Yes, he documents these places in so far as he “would never change something in the scene in front of the camera,” but at the same time, he says, “I am manipulating quite a bit by choosing a particular kind of film, by going out on days with a specific kind of light, in order to fit [the photos] into the collection.”
