Ambling past year two of Analogue Wanderings, I planned to reflect on the journey so far, then decided that would be cringe. Not wanting to leave this as a one sentence paragraph dismissing 2 weekends worth of self reflection and 3 drafts of said abandoned manuscript; in a nutshell; truly breaking the mentality of creating photographs for viewer’s has liberated my approaches to creating work, images starting to skirt the penumbra outside of the purely photographic for photography’s sake.
The book, “local Haunts” Adam Scovell, unlocked some deep-rooted memories of the Wirral, where I grew up. There where many things I felt about the Wirral that I never formalised into any meaningful way. Everything I read about the psychology of place, places with strong emotional impacts, it was always Paris, London and its surroundings or the East coast especially M R James depiction of the Norfolk coast. Adam Scovell was the person to raise the Wirral up to similar psychogeographic heights and that has inspired my next batch of images.
To me, the Wirral is “the edge lands” neither feeling truly rural and not anything inner city. The countryside is impressive but scattered, metal fenced in-between industries and suburbia. Nowhere else seems to change so rapidly from rough-as-fuck estate to peaceful villages. Warwickshire has its rolling hills and open fields, a place you could imagine passing Gents and Ladies who go to the Country Game Show and understand country ways. The Wirral is more random, metal gates, train tracks and the occasional footpaths skirting and bridging the M53 motorway. It sprawls in-between infrastructures of man, not joined but patchy. Its ramblers scousers. It is as much the countryside as any, but a quite different vibe to anything you would image from the words pastoral and bucolic.
What I wanted to achieve with these images was to go against the basic premises of making nice images; You find something pretty and artistically crop out the shit, doing that would then kill the very sense of place I have been wanting to capture. After two years of this blog, I am finally starting to see why breaking out of the “photographer box” to create more meaningful art is so damn difficult especially when the whole audience only wants to see the pretty things.
I wasn’t going to upload the above image, the thought behind it was perhaps more valuable than the print. It is my most Sebaldian of this set, it has an essence of a slightly crappy WG Sebald photograph. His books describe a melancholy event, something hardly worth mentioning that somehow clogged into memory, on turning the page a rather grainy photograph is presented. The reality of the Wirral countryside skirting along the M53 is a part of its sense of place. As a standalone image it doesn’t really work, but with text it can.
A thought that’s been brewing in my head these past weeks; some of the images I love don’t work as a print meant for a wall. In fact, they hardly stand up as a print at all. They are subconscious glimpses that build a map in the mind. That got me thinking of trying to break the prints borders, dissociating it from its frame of the camera’s aspect ratio.
Listening to a lot of Lenswork podcasts, I have been inspired by one concept of presenting a mini body of work as 3 images. It feels right for these images, to build the sense of place. My attempts have proven to me this is going to need a lot more technical planning than anticipated, hence this pile of crap. But I feel possibilities for something quite different in the future.
