Neil Patrick Doherty’s light-filled photographs are landscapes that find their beauty in humble reality rather than affected, painterly grandeur. Working in black-and-white and color, Doherty articulates the power of great space and distance, as seen in simple plains, lakes, and the empty heavens. Nature is a recurring theme — lone buildings nestled in prairie grass, distant mountains, and opaque pools of water, all accompanied by endless swaths of sky. Though the images have no people, Doherty’s proportions are unmistakably at a human level, as if each photo were an entry in a first-person travelogue.
Though Doherty has preferred areas on which he concentrates, his body of work (which also includes surreal clay sculpture and acrylic painting) cannot be limited to a single genre or a set of subjects. “With my photography, I tend to view life from the wide spectrum: from the uncommon abstract to the common of what we see everyday,” he says. “When the shutter closes, the image is trapped in memory - time stops.”