Daisy Dalton has been taking photographs for over a decade, capturing intriguing images from the sun-kissed shores of the Italian lakes to the subterranean cityscapes of her native London. She has specialised in 35 mm for the past six years, after inheriting a well-travelled film camera from a nonagenarian neighbour, which has journeyed with her ever since. An active, searching eye - that energised curiosity we experience when exploring new places - permeates her work, making a familiar urban scene seem as strange and stimulating as a foreign buzzing boulevard or remote jungle track.
In this series, Dalton plays with format, turning landscape into portrait by duplicating and reorienting her photos into not-quite mirror images of themselves, creating kaleidoscopic, semi-abstract works that heighten our own sense of perception, inspired by the way the eye views the world upside down before the brain flips our vision the ‘right’ way up. In these images, beach umbrellas form a bubbling horizon/foreground between bands of sea and sky; a tube escalator turns into a swirling vortex, its passengers like Alice tumbling down the rabbit-hole; undulating mountains appear unearthly and alien, as though captured on Mars rather than the Galápagos. These otherworldly scenes invite us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes, wherever we are, bringing our senses alive whilst also questioning the very reality of seeing itself.
Daisy Dalton was born in 1995, in London. Her work has been published internationally, including in the analogue photographers’ magazine maybe in 2019. The works shown in Shop are pieces from her first exhibition.
Text by George Bray