These two words come up again and again and again in my reading and in discussions with tutors. They’re not unfamiliar – I’ve read Austen’s brilliant parody of picturesque in Northanger Abbey, I’m attuned to the Victorian quest for the sublime in places like Tavy Cleave on Dartmoor, I know enough about Capability Brown gardens to appreciate their picturesque, and of course I know the contemporary meanings – very different in the case of sublime. But as terms I’ve never come across their mention in such profusion as in photography. Perhaps that’s due to their powerful connection to ways of looking, something even more relevant to photography to film, and with their roots in painting, to which photography is more connected as a discipline than is film.

It’s proving useful as a way of understanding my own photography. I now realise that I largely avoid the picturesque – or if I do so, it’s with the intention of sharing an image with people who I know will draw pleasure from it, like my parents. But my relationship to the sublime, which I now see I have fully imbibed through landscape photography, is much more complex. I like bleak moorland shots. I like dramatic post-industrial shots. I like wild skies and rugged coasts. Beginning to understand the sublime is helping me unpick why I often find the shots I take of these unsatisfactory: like the picturesque, they’re driven by emotional response, it’s just I came to find a response to the sublime more satisfactory than the picturesque, somewhat noble, even a touch pompous.

Of course, there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with taking pictures just for their emotional charge, or sharing them. It’s just that, with the kind of analytic mind I have, I always want to go deeper, communicate more. A sublime shot becomes apolitical – even where the subject matter is political. And following the thinking-through style of filmmaking into my photography, analysing and communicating through a lens should be paramount. This can be brought about through subversion – it’s easy to subvert the picturesque, which lends itself brilliantly to parody, but how to do the same to the sublime? One strategy I do use is to bring the two together in a single shot – pretty flowers against a mass of concrete. But there must be other ways. And I must think more about suggesting political context somehow. Just thoughts for now.