A challenging, occasionally frustrating but often fun few days at Falmouth University’s Face to Face 2020 for distance learning MA students. Somewhat depleted in numbers due to the ongoing worries over coronavirus, but we still had students from Scotland, Vienna and Spain. It’s going to take a bit of time to unpick everything, but the two key learning outcomes for me were these.

Realising through my struggle to learn enough about film to operate a 5×4 camera, and a wonderful but hugely pricey digital medium format camera with its vast file sizes, that the most important thing with a photography practice is to start with myself rather than jump to any technology because I think it’s something I should be using. This is why I have a gimbal I never use. It’s why I bought a compact with a vast zoom I never used. My practice, if truth be told, is an extension of my walking. Any technology I use needs to leave me free to walk – hence only one camera, one lens, no tripod. At least, at the moment. Should I develop another way of photographing – like portraits, for example – then it’s worth thinking about. But my photography needs to start with me, be almost prosthesis. It needs to enhance not distract. And that means necessary compromise, but being weighed down with the physical and cognitive burden of kit has to be more benefit than cost. This realisation comes as somewhat of a relief. Maybe, some day, when there’s the opportunity to get tuition and support over a period of days I’ll go back to 5×4. But right now, it’s my Sony and my zoom. 

One of my constant anxieties about my photography can be described succinctly as ‘Who fucking cares?’ Yeah, it’s a beautiful path. Yeah, it’s an eerie ruin. Yeah, it’s a madly abstract reflection. But WHO FUCKING CARES? My group portfolio reviews pretty much focussed on that without meaning to. It’s not enough to be formally excellent: an image has to communicate. I’ve long since had enough of writing that falls into this category – I loathe a clever but empty novel – and I’m very clear about photography that feels that way to me. What I need to do is have the bravery to detach myself from shots that I take that have seduced my through their formal composition. And that’s a hard thing to do. I guess that’s what it’s going to take for my photography to move on from images that are created mainly to please myself that, yes, I’ve composed something skilfully, to, yes, I have something to communicate that’s going to engage others. Asking myself Who Fucking Cares? when on a shoot doesn’t mean that I can’t engage with images I find striking in their weirdness of their beauty, but I need to ask myself, just as I think about the formal aspects of a frame, I need to consider their communicative elements as if this were indivisible from the lines and textures I take so much time over. Because they need to be. (Though of course, sequencing or text can also address this question – but really this should be a good place to start).