Charles March started taking photographs seriously at the age of twelve. Having left school at sixteen, he began his professional involvement with the medium as an apprentice to the film direction Stanley Kubrick, working on Kubrick’s masterpiece Barry Lyndon. This was followed by a stint as a documentary photographer in Africa, working for various magazines, before launching a career in still life photography. He worked on many of the great advertising campaigns of the 1980s including Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut, Levi’s, and ICI. One of his pictures, Shadows (for Osborne and Little), was selected for the Pompidou Centre’s permanent exhibition One Hundred Images of Advertising Photography from 1930-1990. Even then, he was dissatisfied with aspects of photography as it then existed. He describes himself as “always sticking stuff over the lens and doing things technically to knock bits of the image back as it all seemed too garish and too sharp”.
What liberated March was the advent of digital photography, which permits a much freer approach. His photographs are seldom or never meticulously detailed, in a way that we still tend to describe as ‘photographic’. Instead they seem astonishingly free, with the kind of rapidity and sketchiness that we feel is appropriate to drawings.
In 1991, after fifteen years in the industry, family responsibility called March back to Goodwood, the estate owned by his family since the late seventeenth century.
In 2012, he publically exhibited his Nature Translated series, which for him represented the antithesis of the precision of high production still life advertising of the 1990s. Nature Translated went on to be exhibited in the State Russian Museum (Marble Palace) in St. Petersburg, and the Moscow Photography Biennale 2014 (curated by Olga Sviblova) and in 2013 was selected for inclusion in Landmark: The Fields of Photography show at Somerset House, London, curated by William Ewing. Nature Translated was followed by two new critically-acclaimed exhibitions in New York at the Venus over Manhattan Gallery (Wood Land) and London at Hamilton’s Gallery (Abstract & Intentional) and more recently his Seascape exhibition was shown in Los Angeles and London. He has won many awards and his work is held in a number of private and public collections.
Photograph by Uli Weber