Al Keddie is a Scottish-born photographer and visual artist based in Aotearoa New Zealand. A graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, he has lived and worked in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland since 2011. His practice moves across landscape photography, abstract photography, digital painting, drawing, collage, animation and constructed photographic work.
Across these forms, images often emerge through process rather than from fully fixed plans. Photography underpins much of the work, but is rarely treated as a fixed record. Intentional camera movement, long exposure, glitch, altered optics, mobile capture and iterative reworking produce images that drift between recognition and abstraction.
Landscape, movement, memory and the changing conditions of place remain central to the work. This concern is not only with landscape as a subject, but with our being in the land: how we move through it, remember it, alter it and are shaped by it. Years spent hillwalking, bothying and exploring Scotland’s landscapes deepened this connection, before landscape photography gave it a more defined photographic form.
Since moving to New Zealand, walking, commuting, phone cameras, reflected light and fragments of available time have become part of the working method. Ordinary routes through Auckland act as a moving studio, where landscape, street, traffic, vegetation and architecture can be compressed, distorted and rebuilt.
His paintings and abstract works draw from and feed back into photographic ways of seeing, while developing their own language of surface, colour, line, erasure and layered form. Across mediums, the work embraces accident, ambiguity and play, building images that remain open, unstable and subject to shifting interpretation.
His work has been exhibited internationally and recognised through awards in photography, animation and digital media, including honours at Ars Electronica, SXSW Interactive and Take a View Landscape Photographer of the Year (Exhibitions & Awards).