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Over the centuries, many have tried to find ways to express the complexity, subtlety and exceptional quality of fine malt whiskies. Now, one of the most successful evocations has come through the art of acclaimed American photographer Erik Madigan Heck.

Heck portrays the tasting notes of the Double Cask collection from The Macallan through his painterly lens, using props, texture and colour in a striking and contemporary fashion.

His still-life shots of the Double Cask are inspired by the Flemish painters of the 17th century, celebrated for their vivid, expressive portraits that show the true nature of their subjects. The Flemish school included luminaries such as Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck.

Heck’s artworks for the project were on display in Hong Kong last month at Tai Kwun, the restored heritage building in Central, at a special signature tasting event to mark The Macallan Double Cask Collection. The event was led by The Macallan’s brand ambassador for Hong Kong, Stephane Levan, who guided guests through the collaboration with Heck. Guests also delved into mini cask-making activities to discover some of the finer details of the distillery’s traditional craftsmanship. They were also able to sample The Macallan’s interpretation of classic cocktails, including the Old Fashioned and The Sour, crafted from the Double Cask — with guests practising their own mixologist skills to make them.

So how did The Macallan’s Double Cask collection come to be portrayed in such a way?

The answer lies two centuries ago, in 1824, when The Macallan was first distilled by Alexander Reid on a plateau above the River Spey in northeast Scotland.

From the very beginning, an obsession with quality has been the hallmark of The Macallan, crafted in a distillery set within an extensive estate. A single-malt whisky of exceptional character and complexity of flavour, each expression of The Macallan is a multi-layered experience for the senses.

The makers of The Macallan select only the finest spirit “cut”, which is aged in sherry-seasoned American and European oak casks from Jerez de la Frontera, Spain. The casks are an essential ingredient contributing to the distinctive aromas and complex flavours of the spirit.

Translating this sensory masterpiece into a visual form and capturing the signature taste and flavour notes of each whisky variant within the Double Cask collection proved to be particularly challenging for Heck.

With an eye for colour, texture and light, combined with his interpretive style, he proved to be the perfect match to celebrate the collection. The photographer crafted his own masterpiece by interpreting the collection in a series of still-life photographs inspired by classic Flemish portraiture.

Heck, born in Minnesota in 1983, is an internationally renowned artist whose work in photography, painting and film explores the relationships between painting, classical portraiture and fashion. He has won multiple accolades, including the International Centre of Photography’s Infinity Award, a Forbes 30 Under 30 award, and the Art Director’s Club Gold Medal for his Old Masters Portfolio published by The New York Times.

He is also a regular contributor to publications including The New York Times Magazine, Time and Vanity Fair, among others, and has had numerous exhibitions around the world.

The remarkable résumé helps to explain his elegant work, for which he works with natural light, camera effects and digital post-production techniques to produce evocative images that are both timeless and modern.

Describing himself as “a painter who utilises the medium of photography”, Heck’s interpretation of The Macallan Double Cask Collection has produced a collection of photographs that reflect the complexity of natural landscapes and still-life compositions that bring the flavour notes of each whisky to life through colour.

The photographer travelled to The Macallan Estate in Scotland and immersed himself in the landscape to capture the inherent beauty of nature and its role in stimulating the senses.

Each of the three pictorial works capture a different element of the whisky-making process. The signature notes, aroma and colour of each whisky variant in the Double Cask collection are represented by a natural pond set within woodland, as seen in the photograph, The Macallan Estate; the blue and red hues depicted in his Wood photograph reflect the American and European oak barrels as seen through Heck’s lens; while the rich red plumes of smoke rising from a barley field in A Sensorial Journey are the photographer’s interpretation of the fruity, full-bodied flavour of The Macallan Double Cask.

“Whether it’s music or whisky or painting or photography, any sort of art form that we create as humans, the base note is always nature,” says Heck.

Open this photo in gallery:

The Ukrainian government has failed to renew the media accreditation for a photojournalist who has worked with The Globe and Mail since 2014, with the country’s security services demanding a lie-detector test, accusing him of holding a Russian passport and questioning whether his work is aligned with the country’s “national interests.”

Anton Skyba, 34, has worked as a photographer, translator and fellow reporter alongside a half-dozen Globe journalists in Ukraine, as both a freelancer and on contract for the paper. He was a National Newspaper Award finalist this year for his image of a girl in a pink hat standing in front of an apartment blown apart by a missile on the first night of the Russian invasion in February, 2022.

It was a familiar scene for him.

Mr. Skyba has reported on the breadth of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, and has received local media credentials continually since 2015, including in the days leading up to the full-scale invasion last year. His was press card number 113. Since then, more than 14,000 additional credentials have been issued.

But on May 1, Mr. Skyba’s own card expired and authorities have yet to grant him a new one, hampering The Globe’s ability to cover the war as Ukraine pursues a much-anticipated counteroffensive. It can be difficult to travel even inside Kyiv without the military-issued accreditation.

Instead, Mr. Skyba has been asked to appear for two interviews in Kyiv with the Security Service of Ukraine, commonly known as the SBU. He was asked detailed questions about his own background as a person from what he calls the “temporarily occupied territories” of eastern Ukraine.

He was born in a part of the Donbas region seized by Russian-backed separatists in 2014. Mr. Skyba’s parents, who still live there, have since accepted Russian passports. Russia has pledged to treat those still holding Ukrainian citizenship in 2024 as “foreign nationals” and many residents have taken Russian passports.

But Mr. Skyba has a very different relationship with the region’s authorities. In 2014, while working for CNN, he was abducted by separatists. They took him to a former SBU building in Donetsk, where he was beaten, interrogated and locked in a basement with a concussion and dark bruises beneath his eyes. He was kept there for four days before being released.

Nearly a decade later, on April 28 of this year, with three days remaining for his media accreditation, Mr. Skyba was called to another SBU building, this one in Kyiv. Inside, he was ushered into a meeting room with dusty pink walls, Soviet-era furniture and bars on the windows.

A lieutenant-colonel asked him about his birthplace, his education and his parents. They are in Yenakiyeve, a coal mining and steelmaking centre between Donetsk and Luhansk that is best-known as the birthplace of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian president convicted in absentia of high treason in 2019.

The small city was made part of the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic in 2014. During that chaotic time, Mr. Skyba offered a Russian magazine editor help in finding a driver in exchange for accreditation with that publication, which he used to pass checkpoints in the area. But, he says, “I never sent any byte of information to Russian media as a contributor or freelancer, and was never paid by Russian media.”

Nonetheless, he acknowledged the connection to the SBU in April, when they asked him about his past work in the region.

At the end of the conversation, the lieutenant-colonel said he had no objections to Mr. Skyba’s accreditation. “The guy told me, ‘Don’t worry,” Mr. Skyba recalled.

Journalists have entered Ukraine by the thousands since the Russian invasion last year, covering the war from the front lines, hospital wards and devastated neighbourhoods. Ukraine has been remarkably effective in winning foreign support. Last year, a survey of the Pew Research Center found Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was the most-trusted leader in the U.S.

Mr. Zelensky himself wrote to the family of U.S. journalist Brent Renaud after he was killed last year. At least 15 journalists have died since the 2022 invasion.

But as the war has turned into a grinding contest of attrition and destruction, Ukraine has taken a more hard-line approach to journalists. It has revoked credentials for reporters with The New York Times and NBC News before reinstating accreditation. The Times reported on the use of cluster bombs by Ukraine. NBC entered Crimea from Moscow, a violation of Ukrainian law. Ukraine has suspended credentials for journalists from CNN, Sky News and two Ukrainian outlets – Suspilne and Hromadske – who reported from a city before authorities authorized such activity.

Ukraine forbids journalists from reporting numerous aspects of the war, including the location of military installations; numbers of personnel; details of combat operations or troop deployments; information on downed jets or ships; or content seen as “promoting or justification of Russia’s large-scale armed aggression against Ukraine.”

Restrictions have increased. In March, Reporters Without Borders, an international non-governmental organization, called for greater access after new rules denied journalists access to many dozens of “red zone” municipalities. A press officer must accompany journalists travelling to other areas deemed “yellow zones.”

“We are in a pretty complicated situation, because we cannot do our job properly – but our job is crucial for the country in an emergency situation,” said Kateryna Sergatskova, a co-founder of the 2402 Fund, which is run by Ukrainians and equips journalists for war-zone reporting. (Mr. Skyba is a consultant and trainer with the fund; he has also worked with the author of this article.)

Ukrainian officials have cited the need to protect the safety of journalists, and said they need to harmonize their policies with those of the European Union. The Globe’s requests for comment from the presidential administration and the SBU went unanswered.

Ukraine’s embassy in Ottawa said the screening process is unbiased and solely considers “matters of national security.”

“The security check is part of established practice for media accreditation to the war zones and we believe it is understandable,” the embassy said in a statement.

A new policy in April forced the renewal of all accreditations, and made them valid for only six months. Globe correspondents have received the new credentials.

But at the same time, Ukrainian officials seem to be applying fresh scrutiny to journalists whose loyalty they may question.

At least 10 Ukrainian journalists have had trouble securing new accreditation, said Ms. Sergatskova. “Something that unites them all is that they have been working in the occupied areas or they have been to Russia at some point after 2014,” she said. They have been questioned “even though it is absolutely clear they were reporting from there.”

Three weeks after his first meeting with the SBU, Mr. Skyba was called in for another interview. This time, the tone was more aggressive, with a second interviewer who alleged problems with his tax filings, and informed Mr. Skyba that he had travelled to Belarus in 2021 and held a Russian passport. Both were a surprise to him: He has not been to Belarus since 2016, has not been to Russia since he was 18 years old, and possesses no Russian passport.

“I told them that is nonsense,” Mr. Skyba said.

The SBU interviewers said they had found no fault with his reporting. “We don’t see you as an enemy,” they told him. “But we are not sure your work is aligned with the national interests of Ukraine.”

It was a blow to Mr. Skyba, who struggled to respond to an allegation he took as not just false, but a personal offence. He recalled his previous interrogation in Donetsk. The separatists “were accusing me of espionage for the Kyiv junta,” he said. “And now my country counts me as a Russian agent.”

The SBU also asked him to submit to a lie-detector test. Such tests are common in Ukraine, where they are admissible in court. Mr. Skyba has, however, declined. “I don’t understand why a journalist would go through it,” he said. He is also reluctant to undergo another round of intensive questioning. For him, a “lie detector is somewhere around the same level with the torture I had in Donetsk,” he said.

Mr. Skyba has documentation to back his case. A record of arrivals and departures provided by the State Border Guard Service of Ukraine this week shows he has not been to Belarus recently.

But in a letter sent this week to Globe and Mail editor-in-chief David Walmsley, the press office of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said elements of Mr. Skyba’s background remain “unclear.” It posed a series of questions, asking whether Mr. Skyba and his relatives have received Russian citizenship; why he travelled to Belarus between 2019 and 2021; and whether he maintains ties with representatives of the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk republics.

If those issues cannot be clarified, “we ask you to consider co-operating with another fixer so that the work of the media representatives in Ukraine does not stop,” the press office wrote. Fixers are critical local contributors to foreign news gathering operations, who help with translation, logistics and planning.

Mr. Walmsley, in response, wrote to the office to express deep concern at “the apparent attempt to pressure The Globe and Mail into changing the composition of our team in Ukraine.”

He added: “Mr. Skyba has helped us deliver award-winning coverage of the Russian invasion to Canadian readers, reporting that has unquestionably informed Canadian government policy toward Ukraine.”

For Mr. Skyba, however, the lack of media credentials has already given rise to difficult considerations. After his abduction in Donetsk, he received invitations to relocate elsewhere in Europe. A similar offer came in days before last year’s invasion. “My reply always was ‘no.’ I want to stay in Ukraine and I want to report Ukraine because it’s my country,” he said.

Now, however, if he is refused accreditation “it will mean that I am out of a profession,” he said. Without that document, “it’s impossible to do journalism in Ukraine – because all of the journalism in Ukraine is about the war.”

The Centre for British Photography will focus on innovative photographic approaches to landscape and the environment in its six new exhibitions and displays opening this June. From a lightbox composite work of Helen Sear to an immersive exhibition of photographs by Mandy Barker, the Centre will encourage visitors to reconsider the world around them and our impact on the landscape.

James Hyman, Director of the Centre for British Photography said: “Following our hugely successful launch in January, we have decided to give over all three floors of the Centre to stage six inter-connected exhibitions on the themes of landscape and the environment. In an era obsessed with celebrity, documentary and reportage, we are taking a stand to bring attention to brilliant conceptual work by a diverse group of photographers that engages with our relationship to the natural world.

“The works on display will give pause for thought. From John Blakemore’s communion with nature to the plastic pollutants amassed by Mandy Barker, there will be plenty for visitors to consider in this striking group of shows. We are also delighted to be exhibiting environmental work in our windows as a result of our open call. Part of our mission is to platform emerging photographers and to give them prominence in our central London space, so we are delighted that this open call will allow less well- known photographers to show their images alongside those of award-winning photographers.”

The ground floor exhibition, Landscape Trauma, will present works that consider our impact on the land and the way that the past is ever present in all landscapes. And on the lower ground floor, there will be an immersive exhibition by Mandy Barker, Plastic Soup, that will show the many tonnes of plastic debris polluting our oceans and was created to raise awareness of marine plastic pollution.

In the mezzanine galleries there will be three interconnected ‘In Focus’ displays of work by John Blakemore, Jermaine Francis and Helen Sear. In each of these, the photographer uses multi-layered images to engage with our complex relationship with the natural world.

There will also be a display of work from a recent open call, with the work of six photographers going on display in the Centre’s foyer and windows.

LANDSCAPE TRAUMA AND ENVIRONMENT FOCUS FOR 6 NEW EXHIBITIONS
8 June 2023 – 24 September 2023
The Centre for British Photography
49 Jermyn Street
London SW1Y 6LX

Opening Hours
Wednesday to Friday: 11am – 6pm Saturday and Sunday: 11am – 4pm

www.britishphotography.org
Instagram: @centre_for_british_photography