An A & E Consultant at Masterton Hospital, Daniel Schual-Berke's medical skills are both his vocation and a ticket to indulge his passion for photography: he has visited Antarctica eight times, working as a ship’s doctor on small passenger ships, and the images from these trips form part of his current show at Aratoi: ‘Worlds Apart: New Zealand and Antarctica’.
I talked to him during a break in his evening shift, to find out more about his show.
Antarctica obviously made a huge impression on you. What struck you most about the region?
The scenery is awesome, a panorama of ice encrusted land. Ice rules everything and everything is subjected to the seasonal rhythm of the ice. For me this is the element that intrigues me the most: the ice dominates everything. Its extent is unfathomably vast. Its geological power terraforms the landscape. The sculpted shapes and configurations rival the best in the art world. And the surreal ethereal blue color has a mystical quality.
You often manipulate your photos digitally to produce a more ‘intense’ image, as you’ve done in your view of Castlepoint. This is an intriguing landscape because it’s hard to work out whether it is a painting or a photograph.
The digital medium offers the artist an unbridled creative medium, and I used a technique called HDR, (High Dynamic Range) photography to produce the lighthouse panorama. This software gets round the problem of scenes with strong highlights and dark shadows that confuse the average camera. I take three to five images with the tripod in the same position, each with a graduated exposure. At one extreme, the image is correctly exposed to capture the details in shadows, and at the other, the highlights are correctly exposed so that details are not washed out.
The images are then digitally ‘sandwiched’ together so that the composite image contains all the details. The resulting image may look ‘unnatural’ because it is so well exposed throughout the image - some critics do not find this appealing, other's rave about the unique quality of these images.
The presentation of your work is also interesting. How did you arrive at the use of metal bases?
I wanted to find a non-traditional, contemporary framing style, and aluminum panels are becoming more popular as a mounting medium. They are composed of a foam core sandwiched between two thin aluminum sheets. This produces a lightweight but very rigid support for mounting photographs and the surface comes in different colors and textures.
As a US citizen, what made you decide to come to New Zealand five years ago?
I come from a family that immigrated to the US in the mid 1950s when I was quite young. I also studied extensively in Europe. The combination exerted a strong international influence on my life and I continue to have a wanderlust to explore new and interesting places. In 2008 my wife Shay and I were each at a crossroad in our careers and we decided to go off on an international adventure. I was not ready to stop working so we looked to New Zealand for many reasons: you speak a semblance of English, have a reasonable medical system that is Western in its scope, need qualified doctors, and this country has a world renowned mystique and cache that is difficult to ignore. Meanwhile back in the US the practice of medicine has become socially more challenging and, at the time, American politics under the presidency of G.W. Bush was disheartening to us. We came to NZ as adventurers and now find ourselves growing firm attachments to this wonderful country.
Do you have any trips planned for the near future?
I am always searching for an excuse to travel and take photographs. This autumn Shay and I are traveling for the first time to the Philippines, and we have an upcoming sojourn to South Island which we have not fully explored. Somewhere in the next two years I hope to return to Antarctica.
Currently showing at Aratoi: Worlds Apart: New Zealand and Antarctica, until 14 April; Spirit Trees, until 26 May; Catherine Manchester, until 24 March; Something different – Chris Carew, until 24 March.
Wairarapa Museum of Art and History