A provocative new exhibition by the South West Academy of Arts photographer Michael Carter is on show at the Ariel Centre Gallery, Totnes.

Familiar Strangers: Photography Inside and Out presents two ways of looking and seeing.

One is in black-and-white and shows the familiar but strange in the ordered outside world, and the other is the strange but familiar in the coloured, chaotic insides of things in places like scrapyards.

In making the colour photographs Broadhempston-based Carter says he was more interested in looking down at the cracks in the asphalt than at the far splendours of mountains:

“Life, is really almost always lived at close range to things common and touchable.

“Yet they’re the things that are most ignored, and though we do need to get beyond ourselves we often find that what we seek is at the place we left.”

He refers to the poet and artist William Blake, who saw ‘a world in a grain of sand’ and though Carter may not see worlds in the neglected sites he visits he does seem to find unusual unified groupings and an internal dynamic in all the bits and pieces that make up his pictures.

Carter comes away from industrial estates, junkyards, deserted buildings and workshops with abstract works in which rivets, shreds of polythene, cinders, mirror fragments, blistered paintwork and splintered plywood come to seem like lost treasure.

Grossly material though they are, these images have obvious contemplative appeal and perhaps allusions to other-worldly experience.

But Carter is not a mystic and there is no spiritual element to his photography, yet there is enchantment and a feeling of surprise – even amazement – that things are what they are.

The black-and-white photographs offer slightly surreal but common examples of the industrial and manufactured world co-existing in harsh contrast with the countryside, the world of nature. We see gleaming acres of plastic sheeting stretched over fields of organic planting, and steel pylons towering over wild-flower meadows. Telecommunications masts preside over farms, a boat rests on a scaffold above dry fields, a water tower seems to rise from the earth like a gigantic fungus among power lines and telephone wires. In one picture the isolated white shell of a house stands next to a heap of broken furniture in a dark field of mud.

These encounters with odd and incongruous things can sometimes arouse in him eerie feelings of the uncanny. But as a photographer he doesn’t think of this as alienating but as visually stimulating. ‘I suppose I’m half at home in the composite landscape of assimilated misfits,’ he says. ‘Maybe I’m one of them.’

Carter was born in London and studied at Hatfield Polytechnic and the University of Oxford.

He is a graduate in the Humanities and English and a member of the South West Academy of Fine and Applied Arts.

In his landscape photography he avoids idealized images of environmental states and instead seeks to capture evocations of the uncanny and prospects of enchantment.

Familiar Strangers can be seen from Thursday November 5 to Tuesday November 24 between 9am and 4pm Monday to Friday at The Ariel Centre Gallery, King Edward VI Community College, Ashburton Road, Totnes TQ9 5JX .