Claire Newman Williams Artist Biography
Claire Newman Williams was born and raised in England and moved to America in 1988 where she worked primarily as a portrait photographer.
Her work appeared in numerous national and international publications including Time Magazine, The New York Times and The Advocate. Claire returned to the UK in 2005.
During lockdown, Claire Newman Williams has moved away from photographing friends and family, figures and faces and decided to focus on capturing through her lens the nature around her which is now featured in her newest edition of prints.
"Near to where I live there is the site of an old Iron Age fort known as Oliver’s Castle. The high promontory is sprinkled with a distinctive line of trees swept into bleak shapes by years of prevailing winds. I took a camera up there and began to photograph over a period of a couple of weeks. What this series has reminded me of is that as artists we draw attention not just to the presence of an object that we portray, but in how we frame the object, the space that we chose (or chose not) to leave around it, we also draw attention to the absence. These trees are a perfect visual metaphor for the new world we all find ourselves in. Presence and absence."
Before living and working in Wiltshire she attended the University of Birmingham, class of 1987, where she received a BA(Hons) in English. Although she studied English, Claire then went on to work in photography which eventually led her to work in America. After 20 years of working as a commercial and editorial photographer Claire Newman-Williams had become disenchanted by the hours spent sitting in front of a computer tweaking digital files and making people look pretty. She wanted her work to reflect more of her life. It has been said that creativity can simply be the process of learning about ourselves and for Claire Newman-Williams, the change that led to being an artist was when she stopped looking for things to photograph that could be “fine art” images and started looking instead for emotions and memories, feelings and thoughts she wanted to express.
Whether crafting mixed media collages or photographic prints, Claire creates images that appear to have been pulled from the no-mans land that exists between imagination and reality. These images, often described as “filmic” and “haunting”, leave us wondering which world they inhabit. Are they created in our contemporary world, or are these vintage-looking images visual echoes plucked from another era?
Her art work has been exhibited at the London Art Fair and Miami Context with Turner Art Perspective and she was named one of 4 must-see artists at The Other Art Fair, Bristol by Rebecca Wilson of SaatchiArt.
Using a mixture of historical processes, analog and digital cameras, her inspiration comes from sources as diverse as the etchings of Rembrandt, the films of modern cinematic masters like David Lynch, or the loneliness of the music of Lucinda Williams.
Claire captures her images with multiple cameras, not just one, for example, she sometimes uses old film cameras from as early as the 1900’s. “Whatever the process or the equipment used, it seems to me that an image should be a transformation of experience. My aim is always to interpret the subject in some way to produce a picture that is somehow different from the scene I observe with the naked eye. I have no interest in simply recording what is in front of me. To me, the best images don’t over-explain. They leave us asking questions about the boundaries of illusion and reality. Martin Barnes has said that, “Good photographs neatly express the obscure and the complex meeting point of illusion, reality and theatre. When made with skill and sensitivity they inhabit the wonderful hinterland where perception and imagination meaningfully collide,” and this is what I strive to achieve.”