Keeping a photography blog running in the background of my life is as challenging as it is fun. This blog is a place to reflect on my images, integral to my art. After gaining a bit of a one post a week cadence, things are now going to shit. A combination of work stress, man-flue and nothing particularly interesting to say have all conspired against me. In a perfect world I would have a stash of ready to publish drafts, but my posts are created on the spare of the moment, posted seconds after they’re finished.
Somethings been on my mind regarding my landscape images, the closer I get to my goals, the more personal I make my work, the less value I feel it has. Let me explain this conundrum.
Most Landscape photography doesn’t speak to me. Obviously, Ansel Adams would be the epitome of this. His Landscapes are in today’s world; fantasies. Many of these vistas no longer exist. They are about the most spectacular environments on earth, many no longer existing in the same untouched state. They are also about light, tone and graphical composition of idealized extinct spectacular landscapes. They don’t represent anything of the human condition or the world I have grown up in. They don’t speak of my environment; they don’t help me come to terms with the ‘managed by man’ world we live in today. They don’t make me ask “what else could this image say”, It would be like growing up a teenager in 80’s Manchester and finding Vivaldi speaks to you more than Joy Division.
A friend was involved in a BBC documentary a few years back, about one of Scotland’s current greatest landscape photographers. I hated it. An overconfident guy leading a workshop at the bottom of a Scottish mountain. They had arrived before the sun arose at 4 something in the morning. “Look at the light, this is spectacular” or something similar he explained, firing off a dozen shots. “The yellow striking the side of the mountain, I need to capture that fast before the sun moves” Working frantically to photograph the mountain as the clouds and light mutated around it. The documentary showed everything I hated about landscape photography. Essentially the Art of Landscape photography is waking up at 2am to drive to the Foot of a Scottish Mountain. Running on pure testosterone, scrambling trying to capture the light and cloud’s around mountains during epic sunrises. If such sunrise should fail to materialize, fuck the morning off and drive home, return to the manly hunt another day.
My spiritual landscape photographer hero. Godwin represents “me” better. In a documentary on YouTube, she nonchalantly destroys “postcard” style landscape photography as utter tripe. She pictures things as they are, in all their melancholy, damp, dreary beautiful reality. She seems apologetic of using dramatic light, when she does its always to evoke the truth of place, never for its attention-grabbing qualities. She researches and honours the landscape, knows its relationship with man. In contrast to the former BBC documentary, Fay's is a 1980s Open University style, meandering, low beat, could send you to sleep affair, but truly wonderful.
As much as I love Fay Godwin’s Landscapes and words, even her work doesn’t speak fully to me. This is great in some ways; it shows I have something other to say in my work. Whatever that “other” may be. This issue of why I am currently struggling with my own work is that my landscape is the Footpaths of England. My world is farmers’ fields and suburban edgelands. I distrust the idealic and the sublime, I want to honour my world as I see it, in all its melancholy, overlooked beauty. Wanting to reject the epic sunsets and lighting effects, eliminate tricks and dramatizations. Ansel Adams has made me nervous of sophisticated darkroom techniques, I am somewhat frustrated by my own interest and desire to master traditional darkroom techniques when I secretly prefer the gritty Anton Corbjin imagery.
Recently I was inspired to purchase Local Haunts by Adam Scovell. Its about the locations that inspired Writers and Filmmakers. It has the hauntological vibe I like, English edgelands, forgotten overlooked places. What also inspired me was the imagery in the book, slightly naff melancholy photographs that looked out of focus and dead of contrast.
It contained a chapter on the German Writer W.G Sebald. An uncategorizable fictional travel writer with a dark melancholy, miserable sense of humour. I kept hearing about photographs he used to supplement his books, often chosen to add a sense of desolate misery, deliberately photocopied multiple times to enhance their sense of vague. Other images in the book equally grab my attention, stirring my soul.
I have a terrible feeling I’m in love with vague, miserable photography. Seeing it makes me want me to go out with my own camera and honour such places I find on my own travels. Trying to make my work “Art” I print my own images better, sharper, more contrast, better composition, and thus I kill what it was that inspired me in the first place. On the other hand, if I was imitate the qualities I love of vauge’ography I would probably not want to hang them on my wall or place such images in fancy portfolio sleaves.
As this entry concludes, the journey of my art continues down its overthinking meandering path.
This Image represents the “Current State” of my landscape thinking. When I saw it I felt it resonate. I put the Leica to my eye and instantly thought “Nope”. I made myself take the photograph knowing I had to just try and be fucking true to myself. It’s got faults, but it has possibilities, I am glad I pressed the shutter release.
The River Dene is one of the many rivers that run through Warwickshire that at times are something, other times nothing. Unremarkable and rarely spoke of. As I wandered here after work on a Friday afternoon, I suddenly saw it glisten behind the fenced off footpath. For years, I never even noticed it was there.
Almost subject-less, messy, a sense of anywhere or nowhere. Melancholy darkness but the over exposed water giving something of the mystical, a D-Minor note that pierces the dark. It has a sensibility of location more familiar to me than Fays English Realism of more scenic Vistas. It’s got a composition that just holds it together from falling apart whilst almost having none.
It is important not to overthink and add too much into it, it’s still a bit rubbish, Unsure if I’d put it on a wall. It may also be a bit too much self-therapy than anything universal.
Shot after Christmas when the UK was engulfed in Fog, this Image is of a footpath in the Village of Thingwall straddling Barnston. A chunk of my childhood was spent walking here armed with my camera. Beyond that gate is a field that resonates with me, I feel something there but hardly ever find anything worth a photograph. A haunt that inspired my approach, trying to photograph the rural nothingness that whispers to me, then hides. Interestingly, the field beyond may have stories to tell, being rumoured to have a vicious Viking history.
On another of my weekend travels I stumbled upon this book in a tiny second had bookshop. Too cheap to ignore, it went home with me. Whilst not a bad book, its one I finished and remembered nothing. Tom Hustler was more a High society photographer, beautiful Actresses and the Royals. He triumphs the professional photographer over the Amateur, he may have a point. The art of getting a good image on demand of any situation is an altogether higher order of skill than only photographing what inspires you at a time when it does, as is the privilege of the Amateur. It even has a chapter on photographing Girlfriends, of which there appears to be quite a lot. Did I tell you, I knew a girl once?
