Fine Art Photography:
Artist Statement:
I am an emerging artist who is re-engaging with my practice since returning home to Ireland in 2024.
Photography found me before I fully understood why I needed it.
I began making images in 2005, initially as a practical tool to record the world around me for my paintings and drawings, because aphantasia means I cannot summon images in my mind's eye. Without a photograph, a scene disappears.
The camera became my visual memory.
What I didn't anticipate was that the photograph itself would become the work.
There is a further layer of perception that shapes everything I make: I am colourblind. When I look through the viewfinder, I am seeing essentially in the tonal language of black and white. That is, I see the light, shadow, form, and texture.
Colour, for me, is something I discover rather than something I see. It is only in processing that I begin to see the colours that were there all along. The highly saturated palette that characterises much of my work is not a stylistic affectation; it is the honest result of someone encountering colour for the first time, every time.
These two conditions, aphantasia and colourblindness, mean that photography is less a record of what I saw and more a record of what I couldn't.
My practice draws deeply from the tradition of serious colour photography established by Saul Leiter, William Eggleston, Joel Meyerowitz and Martin Parr.
From Leiter, I inherited an attention to atmosphere and the incidental beauty of the overlooked. From Eggleston, a democratic instinct to shoot the ugly, the dull, the mundane. From Meyerowitz, the discipline of filling the frame with the full scene, resisting the urge to reduce a moment to a single subject. And Martin Parr taught him that humour doesn’t need to be achieved at the expense of the subject. These artists have guided me, and I use their artwork as a touchstone that I have spent years trying to make my own.
I work across DSLRs, 35mm film, Polaroid and drone photography.
My completed projects to date, Scenes of Wessex, What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, and Alone With Everybody, reflect twenty years of practice interrupted and resumed, lived across Ireland and the UK, shaped by fatherhood, and a persistent need to make sense of the visible world through the act of looking.
I am an emerging artist. I am still looking.
Artist Bio:
Vincent S. Coster is an emerging artist who was born in Co. Dublin (1976) but grew up in Bray. He is now based in Wexford after living in the UK for 14 years.
He began his creative work in 1996, when he started writing poetry as a serious practice. His first book was a limited print collection released in 2001. Since then, he has published nine collections of original poetry and two anthologies of his work.
In 2000, he started experimenting with oil paints, largely self-taught but attending a number of workshops, he began compiling a collection of somewhat explicit images that were destroyed in a bonfire following an argument with his then girlfriend, who was not pleased with the nude paintings, fearing the reaction of her family if they mistook her for the model.
In 2005, he began experimenting with photography, thinking this would be a means to record scenes because of his aphantasia, which prevents him from seeing images in his mind, but soon he began to experiment with this medium.
In 2008 and 2009, he exhibited his works in an unselected show of works rejected by the RHA, at The Bad Art Gallery in Dublin.
In 2010, he moved to England and took a break from working as a serious artist when he became a stay-at-home father and home educator to his two daughters. He continued to write and published the bulk of his poetry at this time, but his focus was as a homemaker and carer to his children.
In 2022, following the easing of the pandemic conditions, he began shooting street photography around England, mostly to fill time while standing outside Claires and other shops waiting for his wife and children. This then became an obsession, which he continued when, in 2024, he returned home to Ireland.
After moving home to Ireland, he began reconnecting with his practice as a serious thing and, since then, has published two poetry books and completed a landscape series.
