Wandering around Woodbury Common and enjoying the murky flat light, something I’m embracing I think in response to this course, perhaps because it’s stepping away from the picturesque. Many thoughts. First, that the M5 bridge project, though something I love, is fundamentally shallow, ornamental, pretty. That’s not to downplay it, I’m proud of some really great images, but if I want to say more, use photography to analyse deeper, I’m going to need something more complex. It’s been really useful as learning exercise, and it’s not finished, but this is very much a personal project, its final form impossible to predict, though I suspect when I have the images and guts to do so, it’ll be a collection of abstracts. 

Second, that I need to migrate my feelings about filmmaking to photography – that is, rather than a painstaking wish to get the best shots, then and there, think ahead, take time, my restless, ranging approach is just fine. It’s gleaning. Collecting. And, like Varda, it comes to make sense not in the decisive moment, but when put in combination. I need to think not in terms of single stand-out images – which I have hitherto – but of images that form part of a whole, maybe that rely on one another to persuade and express. 

Third, that I won’t be able to express everything I need through photography, just like I needed my voiceover for my filmmaking. So, rather than seek photographs to stand in for information, or write to describe photographs better, I should let photographs express what they express better than words, and words express what they express better than photographs. How they fit together, who knows. It’s early days. 

Fourth, that I’ve chosen something more complex and ambitious than anything else, including film. There’s a need to adapt my style to my subject – to look out for ways of using my lines (like in tracks) and my colours (like in light) and the strange (like the leylandii) and the political. I should look at how a photographer with a recognisable style transfers between very different subject. I should go back to Shore’s Survivors of Ukraine(2015) and go in deep there, but be alert for more – like Davies’ European eyes on Japan (2008). 

Fifth, that if I’m going to go for a time of day to be photographing, then it’s got to be dusk. 

I think that’s some quite good thinking to be going on with.

Markerink et al. 2008. European Eyes on Japan. Tokyo: EU-Japan Fest Japan Committee

Shore, S. 2015. Survivors of Ukraine. London: Phaidon Press.