David Campany: Motion and Stillness.

I love the way David Campany writes. It’s for the same reason I love the way Geoffrey Batchen writes: it’s lucid, personally felt, rigorously thought-through and informed, and with a general readership in mind. You don’t need to knee-deep in postmodern theory, or catapulted from your private fine art niche to hear what he has to say. 

I’ve read Photography and Cinema (2008) before, when I was studying for a Masters in Film & TV at the University of Bristol.  Back then, I was thinking about looking at documentaries about photographers for my dissertation project (I didn’t, in the end). But having read Campany, I could see he not only had a profound grasp of film, but also knew how to talk to those working in film. In fact, until beginning a Masters in Photography, I hadn’t appreciated that photography was his point of departure. 

What particularly impressed me about Photography and Cinema was Campany’s grasp and elucidation of the qualities, limitations and overlaps between the still and moving image. As a practitioner in both, and as one whose practice as a filmmaker, using fixed frames and long takes, was deeply inflected with the working methods of stills photography, I’m acutely aware of and curious about what makes a still image quite so still, and what makes a moving image truly moving, aside from technological differences. After all, the movement in Warhols’ Empire, is barely perceptible, while the blurred figure of Cartier-Bresson’s celebrated Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare is a trace of movement; to this extent, Warhol’s is more the still image, Cartier-Bresson’s more the moving one. 

I’ve heard it said that such permeable boundaries between the two types of photography render the boundary arbitrary, yet another rigid binary for the all-conquering postmodern army to demolish. Permeable and arbitrary, sure, but to deny difference is to deny their qualities and usefulness. As Campany argues, this tension, this constant struggle over territory, is as old as the medium itself and practitioners in both fields, often using this site of conflict in their practice, are to be found ever since the inception of the moving photographic image, the younger of the two technologies. 

Campany argues that what defines each, moving beyond photochemical or digital processes, is not what they are but what they are for. There is nothing inherent in such processes that determines their utility – moving image as popular entertainment, still image as scientific record, for example: rather, that lies in the domain of the cultural. The phenomenology of each is also defining: the still implies a past moment recorded, whereas the moving image provides an illusory presentness, and relate to the previous two examples which I have plucked at random: moving image as voyeurism, still as symbol, as fetish. To phrase it in terms of environmental psychology: the still and moving recorded photographic image offer different affordances

Campany notes that the still and moving image are phrased differently depending on context. To be confronted with a still image – even if it’s actually a sequence of 25 frames per second – in which nothing appears to move accentuates its stillness, anticipates motion to an almost unbearable degree, and invites scrutiny: which is this? Still or moving? To come across a moving image where one would expect a still – such as a flat LED screen on a gallery wall – frustrates the idea of stillness, accentuates the perception that a movie screen is a window rather than a terminal surface. And yet, paradoxically, the still image implies duration in a way that the moving image does not: through accentuating its extraction from a continuous present, the moments bracketing it, stretching out infinitely, are implicated. This does not happen in the moving image: the illusory presentness of film implies an immediacy unavailable in the still, and one is trapped inside the moment of the film in a way that does not happen in the still. These paradoxes, especially when still and moving images are set against one another, liberate extraordinary, profound and distinctive effects. 

This divergence deeply inflects the way narrative operates in each medium. At its most basic level, the moving image is a medium of narrative, even if that narrative is no more complex than ‘the blade of grass waved back and forth’. The still image, on the other hand, as with the painting, requires the imaginative engagement of the viewer to construct the narrative. Even when the images, moving or otherwise, are connected through editing or montage, the demand on imaginative engagement remains higher: it is, to the uninitiated, more effortful to ‘read’ a photobook than a short film, and this should not be seen as a difference in effectiveness but a difference in qualities. As Campany argues, ‘photojournalism requires journalism, because facts, however ‘powerful’, cannot speak for themselves’ (p.28); this cannot be said for video-journalism (should such a word exist), which has a wider range of communicative strategies and a more visually literature ‘readership’ (at least for the past several decades). 

I’ve mentioned that my fondness – partly born from necessity – of fixed-frame long takes makes my filmmaking more ‘photographic’. Operationally, this makes my work more akin to the large-format landscape photographer than my rapidly-moving landscape still photographic practice, chasing light and change. It also taps into a rich tradition of avant-garde filmmaking which eschews the rapid-fire editing of commercial film, allowing the viewer to ‘dwell’ in an image in a way similar to how they might view an image on a gallery wall. This problematises filmmaking, calling attention to the event of recording and implying the present of the filmmaker to a greater extent than if the viewer were carried along on an endless stream of montage. Crucially undermining the perceived function of filmmaking, it drains image of narrative: the longer a shot persists, by and large, the more the uneventfulness of daily life is implied, narrative being an artificial imposition on its random, meaningless flow. It also opens up space for the viewer to exert agency, to gaze around an image of their own volution. The fixed-frame long-take is a cinema of surplus, and many of my favourite directors – Michaelangelo Antonioni, Kelly Reichardt, Gideon Koppel – grasp this. There is much I have yet to understand and articulate on what is known in some circles – already rejected by many filmmakers – as ‘slow cinema’. This post is not the place to engage with this matter fully, but will be the focus of my research in the coming weeks. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

Returning to video

It’s time to reflect on what’s happening with my practice since I – essentially – stopped shooting stills and moved on to video. It needs to be said, this hasn’t happened exactly like this – I’ve always shot stills alongside video, but video has always been project-based, not the casual shooting of stills. That’s changed – if I’m currently going out shooting, then it’s going to be video. 

I’ve learned lots. One of the first things is practical: if I’m looking at an image, whether still or moving, then I want to be able to look at it for a while. Hence, I need to make sure each take is around 30 seconds and – crucially – that I don’t mess around with ND filters, exposure comp, depth of field or any of that. I just need to set the shot up and let it run. The only thing I’m happy with changing is focus, to move that to where my attention goes, or where things are happening. 

This is instructive. It reminds me that there’s a pleasure in looking, whether the image is still or moving. There’s an ontological sameness, gazing, focussing on different parts of the image, weighing up, making sense, appraising. That’s probably because I’m looking at the image on a screen, the framing of an app reminding me of a certain parity. But that curiosity, and that meeting of inquiry with stimulus, is identical. 

But there’s a distinct difference in duration: to a certain extent, movement divorced from narrative, movement that’s reactive and reflexive, can appear abstract, ghostly. There is no hand making this movement: it’s not the movement of a car or a pan or a couple kissing. It’s movement not put on for the camera, but captured by it. It has agency beyond the frame. The world is revealed – or at least foregrounded – as alive and with its own agenda. 

It’s these kinds of movements that I seek out, have always sought out. Reeds waving in the wind. The play of patches of sun on concrete. A butterfly shooting across the frame. Clouds moving across the sky. Even the slightest wave of a dead twig suggests a continuity, foreshadows greater movement. 

Such movement, for me, jars against a too restrained, too formally literal composition. Composition that’s too neat, too obvious – this is the ground, this is the sky – imposed an order on the world that the movement demonstrates to be completely artificial. The shots I’m happiest with are ones you have to work at – using shallow depth of field to keep the moving trees blurred, having only the treetops against the sky, not having the banks of the river, looking up at the tree without roots or tips, avoiding horizontals. In the field I shot on Friday, there’s no structure to fix things, anchor things, like the motorway bridge. There’s no information. There’s just sense. I think, for this project, I’m moving towards the impressionistic. 

I’ve taken one or two shots that repeat the tree close-ups of ivy and weird shapes. These have fascinated me, for superficially, they are repetitions, but the slight movement provides a sense of the spatial completely different to the stills. In those, the tree is everything, and the background is scenery, whereas with moving image, the background has its own life, its own agency. It invites the viewer to look longer and more carefully. 

These are just tentative thoughts. I need to go back over David Campany’s Photography and Cinema (2008) to flesh this all out a bit. 

Campany, D. 2008. Photography and Cinema. London: Reaktion Books. 

A video artist can be a filmmaker and a filmmaker can be a video artist but video art is not film and film is not video

Not coming from a background in fine art, I’ve struggled with the fine art focus of much contemporary photography, much of which leaves me completely cold. I’ve also struggled to address this with tutors and peers, who have of occasion been quite definite that fine art isn’t such an integral part of contemporary photography as I think. And yet, on deciding for the current module to return to shooting video, it’s been indicative that I’ve been pointed in the direction of video art by everyone I’ve spoken with. 

If I’ve had any contact with video art, it’s generally been by accident or because there’s a crossover of some kind with a filmmaker. Every once in a while, I’ve come across video art in gallery spaces and the only one that has left any impression was a ridiculous black and wide film of a naked man bouncing on a trampoline from the 1960s, memorable only for its absurdity. I went to Mark Leckey’s retrospective at Tate Britain essentially because it was built around a motorway bridge, and I enjoyed it as an installation – less sure what I’d have made of Fiorucci Made Me Hardcoreif I’d come across it in isolation. Much of Agnes Varda’s installation work is an extension and reconfiguration of her films. Hassan Hajjaj’s recent exhibition at the Arnolfini included a brilliant film which was basically an extension of his portraits of musicians and performers, but playing with the juxtaposition so that the separate portraits appeared to be aware of one another. I’d had Tacita Dean recommended to me and went to her exhibition last year at the RA – and I’m afraid walked out after 10 minutes as I just didn’t get what on earth was supposed to be going on (without such knowledge, the whole thing was an ugly mess). 

It’s worth recalling the reasons for my return to video. First, with my new Sony, I’m now able to shoot video that looks the way I want it to look. Second, my background is in film and narrative form, primarily the novel. Third, I’m curious to learn just how video occurs in the context of the discipline of stills photography – I’ve heard repeatedly that working in video is something photographers do, but nothing about how that works and why it’s done. Last, I’m keen to bring what I’ve learned over the past year into the way I shoot the moving image and see what happens. 

The first book I tried engaging with, Still Moving(2008), is a collection of essays. It is, I swiftly discovered, an exercise in interrogating the medium, a solipsistic analysis of the technological, economic and ideological contexts of the making of still and moving images. The focus is here on the act, as often in academic works on photography, and rarely moves beyond that. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not interested in these conversations, at least not right now; what interests me is what I can learn and draw from my environment, physical and cultural, through the act of photographing. I have other means of doing this at my disposal – writing, walking, discussing, researching, looking, listening. When I listen to the world, what interests me is what I can hear and through experimentation, getting the most out of hearing; I’m much less interested in HOW I can hear, and it’s the same for me with photography. After a skim through of introductory paragraphs, Still Moving is consigned back to the shelf. 

The second, Moving Image(2015), is a collection of interviews, articles, reviews and the like, investigating the subject of video art. There is here, too, an overwhelming emphasis on interrogating the medium, a fascination with scratches on celluloid, repurposing tv adverts, the technologies of utopias and a telling discussion which attacks narrative cinema for being toxically ideological (I think there are better ways to destabilise ideologies than making difficult art which is only readable by your peer group). It is telling that Bill Viola, who I’d never heard of until beginning this investigation (such is the invisibility of video art beyond itself), and who makes work that is accessible and exquisitely crafted but philosophically astute (my personal definition of what makes for great art), has explicitly stated his gradual rejection of these obsessively abstract, obfuscating means of practice. 

In amongst this is the concept of ‘expanded cinema’, which envisions video art as a development of, not a reaction against, narrative film. Expanded cinema reconsiders the context in which the moving image can be experienced, whether in an art gallery, projected onto derelict buildings, through water, or whatever. I think this is useful as a defining concept that draws a line, however tentative, between the cinema-based film, in all its forms, I have come to develop considerable knowledge of, and video art. It – literally – expands cinema, suggesting novel opportunities and creative forms. In an era when the moving image is now nearly always experienced on a personal digital screen, this strikes me as crucially important. Other discussions comment on the relationship between film and context as a central part of the art – such that a work of video art can only be exhibited, indeed will only make sense, if the artist’s instructions for exhibition are followed. 

One of the great frustrations of video art – and one I suspect that keeps it from being better known – is its inaccessibility, which is a perhaps inevitable outcome of all the above. With non-time-based media, like photography, painting, sculpture, it’s easy to encounter this work second hand, through print and digital media. Even with time-based media such as cinema or theatre, it’s possible to encounter through DVD, scripts, streaming services, Youtube and so on. But video art appears difficult to experience remotely. There doesn’t seem to be a platform which lets you view video art: the majority of films being talked about aren’t available and so – and this is surely a bitter irony – the only way of accessing them is through the words of someone who isn’t the artists. There ARE platforms, but aimed at exhibitors and at a discouragingly high price tag. And whereas you can experience excerpts from a photobook online, there is not the complete caesura in experience as that between a still from a work of video art – which is an art of movement – and the video art itself. 

Anyway, the upshot of all this investigation is this: being a video artist and a filmmaker are not the same thing, though a filmmaker can also be a video artist (such as Agnes Varda, who is exemplary at both), and a video artist can also be a filmmaker (such as Steve McQueen, who likewise is exemplary at both). And the defining element, to me, is not to be found in interrogating the medium (which film has been doing anyway right from the outset – the Lumiere brothers played with still and moving images after all), but in the contexts in which video art is encountered. It is the markedly different possibilities and limitations of ‘expanded cinema’ which I will now need to investigate to see how my photography can be reconfigured as video art, rather than narrative film. Or whether I will continue to work as a filmmaker, but draw on the experience and knowledge acquired through the practice of photography. 

Beckman, K., & Ma, J. (eds.) 2008. Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Kholeif, O. (ed.) 2015.Moving Image. London: Whitechapel Gallery. 

Susan Trangmar – A Play in Time

Susan Trangmar originally trained as a sculptor and has in time moved through still and into moving image work. A Play in Time is the result of a year’s residence, partnering with Photoworks and Brighton and Hove District Council, in St. Ann’s Well Gardens, a small formal municipal park. Trangmar worked with a digital camera fixed on a tripod, recording small details of plants, the activities of the users, the park’s built environment, as well as considerable sound archives. The result is a 25-minute film with one or two clips playing at any one time, and a book containing stills, essays and an interview with Trangmar. 

This is a work I can really relate to. It demonstrates a very deep immersion by the artist in a place, such that she becomes a part of it. The long take, fixed-frame format, taken from a tripod is exactly my preferred way of working, and Trangmar is likewise interested in the formal possibilities of the frame beyond the representational. Many shots are semi-abstract, and all are lovingly composed. Where Trangmar differs from my work is that she has not sought to ‘explain’ the park: there is no walking of the boundaries, no attempt to orientate the viewer, but rather it is as if we have been transported to the park and are looking around to discover it for ourselves. This is something I can learn from. Nor does she differentiate between semi-abstracts of the human and the non-human – park users are often headless, or just a pair of limbs, and their activities abstracted, such as the shadows of children on swings – again, more to provide a sense of place than a logical, linear document. 

Trangmar has constructed space in a fascinating way. This is partly due to the split screen format, which gives both a sense of simultanaeity of events, rather than singling them out as a single screen would do, and it is also in her lavish use of sound, almost all of it off-screen, giving snippets of conversation, seagulls, traffic, and many sounds which can’t be easily identified. The bird song, like the traffic, is foregrounded to the point of exaggeration and this provides a considerable sense of the pastoral. The split screen also adds a disorienting sense of slippage where different moments of the same shot are side by side; this is partly intended to emphasise the slipperiness of memory, but for me it suggests the park as embedded in individual routines. 

It’s also interesting that Trangmar has chosen not to delve into a key moment in the park’s history: in the late c.19th, it was the site of the second ever film studio, and a huge number of early films, many of them technically revolutionary, were made in St. Ann’s Well Gardens. Many filmmakers and artists would have taken this as an opportunity to ‘interrogate the medium’, but for Trangmar it appears to be sufficient that she is continuing a tradition, leaving the accompanying essays to flesh out this detail. 

The accompanying book is also notable: it picks out stills from the film and resets them against the white of paper, hence the images resonate differently. It is a different and by no means inferior way of encountering the park which emphasises the images’ formal aspects. It also emphasises the importance of movement to the film. 

There is much for me to learn here: returning to filmmaking after developing a stronger sense of how and why I make images the way I do, it’s interesting to see a work where formalism is both central but never overbearing. It’s also worth considering what can be achieved beyond a cinematic context, by the use of split screen and different media. I will be investigating Trangmar’s work more thoroughly in future. 

Trangmar, S. 2008. A Play in Time. Brighton: Photoworks.

Installation, video art, whatever

Given that the two filmmakers who’ve made the biggest impact on my own filmmaking – Agnes Varda and Gideon Koppel – have both worked on installation projects (prolifically, in Varda’s case), it’s a medium that should be relevant to me. In fact, I’ve often wondered whether this wouldn’t be a better place to put some of the very slow films I’ve made like Strands, which is surely too ponderous for a film festival screening. I find it also neatly straddles the divide between photography and film, both contextually and phenomenologically. To a certain extent, I want to create works in which to dwell, to rest oneself rather than be propelled along, and an installation strikes me as an excellent medium for providing such an opportunity. 

My reason for taking this Masters had nothing to do with this interest. I had wanted to explore my visual sense, its cultural influences and – latterly – its autobiographical imperatives. I had also wanted to begin exploring how others connected with landscape visually and phenomenologically and to find ways of expressing this in my own work. I had also wanted to deepen my connection with the Pebblebed Heaths, and all of this has been in preparation for a film PhD. To a considerable extent, I’ve achieved much of what I set out to do, and in some ways even surpassed that. And so it’s little wonder that I have found myself floundering during this module. I just don’t know where to go next. 

There have been further destabilising factors. As I’ve mentioned previously, the arrival of the Sony a7siii has completely thrown me, and this has been compounded by an ever-increasing abundance of film work. A recent trip to Bristol brought me to the buildings where I studied for my MA in film – a difficult experience, but the difficulties were practical, and I found myself absolutely flying in that context in a way I never have on this MA. And with all this general vagueness, the deliberate vagueness of this photography MA has just compounded things: right now, being asked to make a specific kind of film with a set length and specific objectives would be wonderful. 

And so I have to set my own specific objectives: create some kind of video-based thing. I’ve the germ of a concept: base the work around the tiny enclosures on Colaton Raleigh Common, as these are weird places, places to dream and imagine, and so can extend the Hidden Corners ideas (perhaps referencing works like The Secret GardenThe Enchanted Castle and other examples of childhood magical trespassing) but also connecting this to the deep politics of enclosure (childhood as anarchy). Deliver both a sense of place, but an angle on that which draws on both the politics and the reverie. 

But who to model what I’m doing on? I’ve had a few ‘video artists’ recommended to me, but for the most part I can’t stand this stuff. It feels – well, if I’m being honest, it feels horribly precious and pretentious. It feels like the kind of thing you could only ever connect with if you were from the same world as the person who made them – that fine art background, with all the attendant ‘criticality’. I’m sure if you know how to read her work that Helen Sear is really good, but I don’t and – frankly – I’m not interested to learn how to. I can see this is going to be a struggle, but I’m sure there will be fellow travellers. Likewise, though much ‘video art’ is performance based, even though work such as that of Bill Viola is stunningly good (that I’d never heard of him demonstrates how niche video art is, all but invisible to most), it’s not going to be useful to me to investigate that. I’m certainly not about to put myself in my work as I just don’t think I’m that interesting as a subject, and there, quite frankly, isn’t anyone else to work with. 

Given his deep connection to the Parisian film scene of which Agnes Varda was a part, it’s perhaps little surprise that William Klein, a photographer/ filmmaker recommended to me, is one whose work resonates. His Broadway by Light, from 1958, is dazzlingly beautiful, both documentary and abstract, grabbing the gorgeousness and complexity of the world of actuality and building a montage piece that overwhelms in a way that is both aesthetically rich and highly political. I will be looking at his work further. 

And then there’s Susan Trangmar, whose A Play in Time I encountered exactly a year ago at the Martin Parr Foundation, back when the world made rather more sense. Trangmar, I can see through her work and the way she talks about her work, is someone from who I can learn a great deal. I suspect the next post from me will be exactly about her. 

WHERE’S THE GODDAM CRITICALITY IN THAT BARK????

So many questions. So many questions. And no one to answer them. 

On Saturday, I walked past the building at Bristol Uni where I studied film. It was a really imperfect situation, but the problems were all practical – class sizes, a disengaged lecturer, a strike, not living in Bristol like the other students. As for the subject, I knew, instinctively, what I was doing. I flew. I could talk and just absorb everything around me. I got really great grades and was with people with who I shared a common language. The course was structured around chunks of knowledge, and there was choice to develop specific areas. 

I wonder if it’s because I’m doing a course which is founded on a fine art pedagogy that I’m struggling. I’d heard you don’t really get tutored in skills, you don’t really talk about style, you just get prompted to think critically about what you do. I just cannot connect with this course and as time goes on, I feel more and more adrift from the other students who’ve been able more or less to follow what’s been provided. 

I’ve been here before, when I studied for my creative writing MPhil. Then, too, there was a gap between what I was doing and what I was expected to be doing. Of course, this gap isn’t supposed to exist, and few will acknowledge its existence. In creative writing, the gap is about class and privilege – the only English white men who are allowed to write novels about having an ordinary life are from the professional classes, or from Oxbridge, or both. Otherwise, you have to find something exotic to write about, or are banished to genre or historic fiction. So I have been here before, and if I’d known that writing psychologically-insightful fiction about everyday, unglamorous middle class people was forbidden (which it’s not in Scotland, or the US, or Australia etc. etc.) then I’d never have even started down that road. So yet again, I’m feeling the gap, and I need to think about what’s missing. 

I’m noticing more and more of my peers are working on autobiographical and self-referential work. I’m wondering if this is a currently common theme in photography, if it’s been like this for a while, or if it’s always been a big part of it. I wouldn’t know, because my knowledge of photography is quite specific. It’s a fine and noble thing to do, and goodness knows, enough great art, whether visual or not, is highly personal – but if you don’t find yourself or your life subject matter you want to work with – if your compulsion to create art is to escape rather than encounter yourself, then it always fills me with a certain amount of awkwardness and a great deal of jealousy as people mine their pasts, their families, their relationships, their inheritance. I’ve nothing to say about mine, frankly. It’s all terribly, terribly dull. Of course, you can never escape yourself, not entirely, and your point of departure will always determine the direction of your escape, but even so, even so. 

I’m also entirely uninterested in interrogating the medium. Again, I guess it’s all about escape. When I photograph, I pour myself through the viewfinder, through the lens, and go about reinventing the world, rediscovering the world. A camera lets me perform an act of alchemy, lets me see the world afresh, lets me connect in a new way. That this little box does such a thing is nothing short of a miracle. I don’t want to think too much about how that happens. It would destroy the magic. Who needs to know the mechanisms by which vanilla acts on us? You just want that fragrant, sweet, mustiness. It might be interesting that vanilla is a kind of narcotic, but who really cares? That’s how I feel about taking a photo. Why is there such an obsession with the medium? I remember walking through the Tate Modern Shape of Light exhibition and coming to the final room which was drab and ugly and clever and I just walked through it, after being dazzled with all this play and transcendence in the previous rooms. Interrogating the medium. There’s only a point to that if you’re making work for someone who wants to interrogate the medium along with you. I’m so goddam bored of clever. 

Cemre told me that what was lacking in my work was putting criticality in my practice. My ability to make pictures is fine. There’s nothing to be fixed there. The thing is, I don’t understand what that means. I don’t understand why there needs to be any criticality visible. When I look at photos, I’m not looking for criticality, and I don’t know how to read for it anyway. When I look at a photobook, I’m usually fairly oblivious to that sort of thing, and for the most part, I don’t see the narratives, or the visual language that’s being spoken. I just see images, and they act on me, and they draw responses from me. 

This isn’t so with film. I know exactly what I’m doing there, exactly what can be achieved with an edit, with sound, with carefully written voiceover. I know what I want to say and I know how to say it. It’s informed by a huge amount of research and thought and it’s all there in the film. This doesn’t happen with my photography, as in it’s not there in the photographs: you need a bit of written context to support that. And without conversation, and thorough and regular feedback, I’m not going to be able to put the criticality in my work. These are not things that have been available to me on this course, and it’s not something that comes intuitively to me as it does with film. 

And so, unsurprisingly, I’m back with video, remembering how I know exactly what I’m doing. And I wonder just how this is now going to work. I suspect that when I hear people talk about photographers also working in video, it’s actually, mostly, just a bit of an add-on, a side-show, just like photography is for filmmakers. Even if they get really good at it. Maybe this is why I’m struggling to get any advice. It’s all – yes, such and such also works in video. And that’s it. 

It’s all driving me nuts, it really is. I’m hardly taking any photos. I just look out at the world and think, it’s all been taken before, it’s just another fucking tree, who cares, so what. WHERE’S THE GODDAM CRITICALITY IN THAT BARK???? 

A new camera changes everything

It’s been a pretty painful few weeks. First, Jesse pointed out – well, someone had to – that my woodland project was, especially in the current circumstances, perhaps a bit ambitious within the timeframe. It’s a great idea, and something to work away at slowly, but letting go of that as the next hot thing for me was tough, especially in the absence of any coherent idea for this module. 

Second, and this might sound ridiculous, but the arrival of the Sony A7siii has thrown me more than I could possibly have anticipated. Not the technical headaches it caused – £399 for a new memory card, £270 for an upgrade to my editing software, and all of this more or less worked out single handed. Nor specifically the anxiety caused by changing camera in the early stages of my first major commission. But the possibilities suddenly opening up. Because unlike my previous Sony, the A7siii shoots video to the same quality as my stills cameras. And this has thrown absolutely everything, finally broken down the wall between my film and photography worlds, and meant that I no longer need to work out if I’m a filmmaker or a photographer, but able to occupy and explore the middle ground. 

I looked into the relationship between the moving and still photographic image during my Film Masters at Bristol, but not revisited this research, over two years ago. Likewise, I’ve been curious as to why it’s OK to work in video on a photography MA, and how video operates differently in this context – as it must for the sake of disciplinary coherence. And given that I’m hellbent on doing a film PhD with a supervisor from a fine art background, it makes sense to spend the coming module reconnecting with film in a fresh context. 

So I’ve ordered a bunch of books, got a few recommendations, revisited some practitioners who work in both, begun asking around for recommendations and advice, and one of the things that occurs to me is how comfortable I feel occupying this middle ground, how much I’ve already thought this through, perhaps even without realising it, and how it maybe gives me a critical edge with my photography, in a contemporary context where awareness of the medium is so utterly central. This could be my niche. 

So, today and earlier in the week, I’ve been out at Woodbury Common, tripod over my shoulder, filming. As a filmmaker, I work much more like landscape photographers who use large format and view cameras. Working with a tripod, shooting less, covering less ground, this is how I’ve always worked as a filmmaker. I really go in deep, interrogate details in a way I don’t with stills. And so I thought, if I’m to keep things at the heaths, rather than the great roaming explorations of the past year, I’d pick an idea, or a theme, and explore that. Keeping with commons, I thought enclosures would be good, especially given that the heaths have some odd little enclosed pockets which have their own distinctive sense of place. 

Today, I decided to explore what’s known as Diamond Plantation, a tiny rhomboid woodland on the bank of a valley mire which is surrounded by enclosure embankments. No particular agenda, just seeing what happened. I knew I wanted to express a sense of the place – so views from the rises around it, the sounds and vegetation to be found there. But what I didn’t expect was to come full circle with the Hidden Corners/ childhood idea: these odd little places have become places because they’re enclosed. They’ve become anomalous in the landscape by being enclosed and improved, developing a separate character, and that makes them magic kingdoms, with portals and potential. More, their very enclosure invites invasion, reminding me of breaking into forbidden places, especially gardens, when I was a child. And so I’m able to bring to these profoundly political, violently exploitative places, the imaginative anarchy of childhood. That’s pretty damned cool – and it’s also perfect that there are vestiges of all kinds of games here – dens, a smoke grenade, bike tracks. I found myself drawn to the fantastical – eerie wood shapes, a fly agaric, pitcher plants. My eye for the fantastic is undiminished, it turns out.

Around these places, I think I can work out everything I need to: deepen my understanding and connection with commons, and these commons in particular; expand on the childhood themes from hidden corners (one or two shots recall, deliberated, E.H. Shepard); give me the opportunity to interrogate the overlaps and divisions between still and motion photography through my own work and research; bring to bear on my filmmaking what I’ve learned about photography over the past year; consider how still and moving image can be combined into one body of work (the stills from this camera are excellent). I also remembered just how abstract light can become in video – watching sun sweep through a valley: you just can’t capture that the same way in stills. 

I’m also thinking through the Wellcome Brief – focussing on the devilish figures in the burned gorse and the crucifixes in the dead trees emphasise the fantastical dimension of eco-anxiety. Likewise, keeping these in a very shallow DOF emphasises the narrowness of vision thinking like this entails. I think this will work. 

Out of my tree

I like to spend a while mulling things over before writing anything down, so the gap in this CRJ indicates significant mulling. In light of various constraints, discoveries and understandings, I’m now moving the focus of my work on this Masters away from registered commons to woodland. Of course, that’s not to say none of the images I’ll be making will be of registered commons, as significant woodland is often found in such places, but the social, cultural and historic fact of commons now assumes a lesser importance. It’s also worth mentioning – though in itself this merits a post all its own – that I can ‘see’ the project I’m about to discuss as a photography project, while my commons project I can ‘see’ more as a film; indeed, it will be the focus of my Phd.

I’ve always taken pictures of trees. My two photos published by The Guardian were both of trees, and if you look at my Instagram feed, whatever the environment, be it coastal or urban or agricultural, there’s usually a tree somewhere in a starring role. When we visited Morocco in 2018, I was as fascinated with the walnut groves and juniper scrub as I was the Islamic architecture and ancient streets. 

Nr. Tizi Oussem, 2018, Andy Thatcher

My Hidden Corners zine for the previous module’s Work in Progress Portfolio was entirely composed of woodland shots – mostly plantation woodland. My great take-home lesson from this project was how naturally I am drawn to hidden wooded corners in the landscape, and was able to identify this attraction with the books and films of my childhood, as well as the melancholy such places evoke as befits someone such as myself who has endured long stretches of serious depression. I had felt at the time, this work was a sidestep move, largely in response to the reduced ability to travel of lockdown, but rather than get back on with visiting the commons I’d meant to – Greenham Common, the Forest of Dean, Runnymede Meadow – I’m keen to pursue this line of inquiry. 

Uphams Plantation, 2020, Andy Thatcher

I’m keen to create as my Final Masters Project a body of work studying woodland which appears in or has influenced well-loved children’s books. Having grown up close to the Ashdown Forest, better known as Winnie-the-Pooh’s Hundred Acre Wood, this keeps the project’s personal connection. But it’s also something I can see would have a broad appeal. To begin with, in response to the climate crisis, and intensifying during lockdown, local green space and nature across all media, are enjoying considerable public attention, and the destruction of woodland, whether for HS2 or at the hands of the Amazon’s illegal loggers, is a major concern for many. In addition, children’s literature enjoys considerable cultural prestige in the UK, which has produced many of the world’s best-loved works, and is deeply connected with a sense of landscape and nationhood. A book that gathers together, in words and images, woods that many have loved without ever visiting would seem a strong candidate for publication. I also have some quite useful connections to promote this, not least the novelist, reviewer of children’s books for broadsheets and nature-lover Amanda Craig, who I have in mind to write an introduction. 

buckinghamtoday.co.uk, 2020

It’s important to me that the project collects a diversity of woodland from a diverse range of books. Hence I’m keen to track down the Gruffalo’s deep dark wood just as I am Enid Blyton’s Enchanted Forest. I also want to acknowledge the threats to woodland, already depicted in Colin Dann’s Animals of Farthing Wood (a housing estate in the middle of a book of woodland images would strike quite a strident note), and it’s fascinating, desperately sad and oddly fitting that half of the ancient Jones Hill Wood, which inspired Roald Dahl to write Fantastic Mr. Fox, is being destroyed to make way for HS2. Other woods already identified are Puzzlewood in the Forest of Dean (Tolkien’s Mirkwood AND Rowling’s Forbidden Forest), Wytham Woods (Horwood’s Duncton Wood), Bisham Woods (Graeme’s Wild Wood from The Wind in the Willows) and Hampstead Heath (the lampposts of which inspired Lewis to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). 

‘Looked at himself in the water again’, 1926, E. H. Shepard

It’s also important to acknowledge that many children’s books are beloved for their illustrations. Sheppard’s depictions of the Wild Wood and the Hundred Acre Wood take particular care with trees, which often dominate the frame, and I can identify something of my own style and preferences in Tolkien’s illustrations of Mirkwood and the strange and exotic woodland of Tove Jansson’s Moominland. Thus a question of style inevitably emerges. A project photographing places used for celebrated imaginings which presenting them in a documentary, objective style would, to me, miss the point. Anyone can track down these places via Google, after all. Rather, I would prefer to use both the places and the stories to which they are connected as the jumping off point for my own imaginings. We none of us read a story in quite the same way, and our own memories, experiences and temperaments find expression when we apply out imaginations to a work of fiction. I would thus create, essentially, my own illustrations for these works. 

Untitled (tree), 1990, Stephen Shore

Different photographers see trees in different ways, and trees being such huge things, there are many ways of seeing them, from distant picturesque shots of a wooded ridge, to a close up abstract of bark. I increasingly find trees strange, alien things, and love them no less for that. Their bark can take on fleshy textures, as if they have appendages and orifices, and their relationship with other plants, whether parasitic or not, creates peculiar embraces and wrestling postures. The disturbed, but brilliant, imagination of HP Lovecraft has left its mark on me in this regard, and I find it hard not to relate to woodland as if it is not, in fact, responding to some alien intrusion, as does the woodland in his The Color Out Of Space. It is this strangeness which to some extent explains the enduring appeal of woodland in children’s literature – a world as foreign to children as the adult world for which it often prepares them – and so it makes sense to me to continue to capture this in my practice. 

Clifton Downs, 2020, Andy Thatcher

There’s a political, post-human dimension, too. It is easy to view trees anthropomorphically: like us, they stand, are long-lived, and even their limbs appear to reflect outstretched arms. But this denies trees their autonomy, their fundamental difference, and lends itself to an infantilisation which undermines respect for them as beings in their own right, something Richard Mabey proposes in The Ash and the Beech (2013). Moreover, according to Wholleben (2017), there is increasing scientific evidence that trees are to some extent sentient, albeit in a radically different way to us. Thus it makes sense to me, not to attempt to capture, or not to seek to primarily capture, whole trees, or collections of whole trees, but details, especially where those details express what Mark Fisher describes (2016) as ‘the weird and the eerie’ (see earlier posts for more on this work). So if much conventional depiction of woodland seeks to emphasise the familiar, the comfortable, the nostalgic, the restorative, I would prefer to return to that overwhelmingly found in children’s literature: woodland as unknown and unknowable, forbidding and full of possibility. And over the course of this module, rather than explore a specific woodland – although I intend to visit Stoke Woods often, a few miles from my home – I want the trees themselves to be the subject of my practice. 

Stoke Woods, 2020, Andy Thatcher

Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater.

Mabey, R. 2013. The Ash and the Beech: The Drama of Woodland Change. London: Vintage.

Wholleben, P. 2017. The Hidden Life of Trees. London: William Collins.

Artist as outsider

I’ve felt, throughout this MA, that I don’t belong. I don’t speak the language of photography, I don’t connect with the criticism about it, and I don’t understand the fine art context of much contemporary photography. I often wonder by what sleight of hand I ended up here. I’ve rejected the majority of what I’ve been presented with; it reflects neither my background, nor what makes me take photos, nor how it feels for me to do so. But inasmuchas this course is all about positioning myself in relation to contemporary photography, I’m nevertheless doing exactly what is asked of me. 

So, I know what I’m not, and what it’s pointless trying to become, and I’m fine with that. I know how my writing, my academic background, and my filmmaking have shaped my photography, and why that makes my work distinctive. But there’s not getting away from the idea that photography is art in a way that film just isn’t. So the question needs to be thought through carefully: if I’m in the business of making art, what kind of artist am I? 

I was fascinated to come across Charles Russell’s Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Self-Taught and Outsider Artists. Just the title alone had me interested. Outsider and Self-Taught art is a well-researched and well-respected field, though seemingly little-known to the overwhelming majority of the public. Outsider artists are those who do not belong to the mainstream (not here used in any pejorative sense) of the word, especially those whose living circumstances make them outsiders to the mainstream of society; mediums, institutionalised schizophrenics, the homeless. While all of these are self-taught, the term self-taught artists also includes those who otherwise are part of society, often coming to create art as an expression of their profound religious feelings, or as an unheralded outpouring of creativity unleashed late in life. Like all terms, they are slippery – self-taught artists have to some extent been taught by their exposure to other artists. Outsider artists can continue to create work after critical recognition and with financial support – so are they outsider artists? Flawed terms, yes, but useful. 

In many ways, such artists are, simply, artists. They take from and reconfigure the worlds around them, its art-objects, material manifestations. They frequently do so to externalise their interior lives. And while the intensity with which they do so is markedly different from the majority of artists working within the academy, such primal ferocity is found in, say, Bacon or Pollock, such intense illusions are found in Grayson Perry and Magritte, such obsessively prolific activity is found in Warhol. What marks outsider and self-taught artists out is that such elements are typical, even defining of this type of work, simply because such art is created not for the art crowd, or the critics, and often it is not created for anyone at all, but the art is first and foremost created for the self. There is no, or very little, dialogue with art as an idea; relationships with other art-objects are direct, personal responses rather than coolly critical contextualisations. It is not art about art, but art begat of art. 

I recognise in this much of my passion for creating photography; I am similarly interested in finding reconciliation of difficult oppositions – nature and culture, self and other, rejection and acceptance. I am similarly interested in drawing on a hotchpotch of influences – Matisse, EH Sheppard, Chrystal Lebas, HP Lovecraft – to create illusions in which to escape. I am similarly more interested in my own direct responses to photography than elaborate philosophical contextualisations. I am similarly unconvinced in critical discourse’s claim – and that of photographers closely working in this register – to speak to the universal, seemingly unaware of its frequently solipsistic, closed loop of self-referencing. 

It’s important, however, to recognise a key difference: until fairly recently, nearly all working photographers were self-taught, and many still are. And while photography, so it seems to me, is in the process of transitioning to the academy more and more firmly, it still embraces outsider photographers like Vivian Meier in a way that fine art still does not. 

This is the beginning of a train of thought for me, one I will return to. Outsider art is a powerful means for me to understand my position as a misfit on this course not as a weakness, but as a strength. It will give me something on which to draw for confidence and for direction, to prevent me from hankering after ways of thinking and working that seem ‘correct’ but are ultimately alien to me. 

Russell, C. 2011. Groundwaters: A Century of Art by Outsider and Self-Taught Artists. New York: Prestel.