I love it when I come across a photographer who feels like a fellow traveller. Shore. Godwin. Gossage. And now Billingham to add to the list. Why? Billingham, like me, has a fascination with bold lines and bands of texture and colour. Like me, people are within the landscape, if they’re there at all. He also has an eye for extremes – acute angles, brutally partitioned flat horizons. What is especially interesting is that his images largely place natural lines either horizontally (horizons, water) or vertically (trees, cliffs). It’s the manmade lines that are typically diagonal – tracks, wires, fences.

What really impresses me, aside from the immersive sequencing of this collection, is how his eye and style applies itself to such a variety of landscapes in such a way that they’re rendered both uniform and distinctive, as with the two pictures below.

The collection demonstrates a sameness to landscapes which allows the viewer to consider their distinctiveness by, effectively, placing them side by side. Here, both compositions are similar. But the colours, the sky, the cattle, dust – and lack of it, metalled surface – and lack of it – sharply delineate the economic power which makes a leisure trip to the South Downs, from the lack of it which is evidenced by the subsistence farming of Ethiopia.

I’m still determining my style, as I don’t want to limit the communicative aspect of my practice by narrowing too much. Billingham’s work demonstrates that style and message can form a coherent whole.

Billingham, R. 2008. Landscapes 2001-2003. Stockport: Dewi Lewis Publishing.