Taxonomies are tricky, paradoxical creatures. They both open up and shut down conversation, make sense and nonsense. I hate them and love them in equal measure, but find them indispensable in developing thinking. I can see that Szarkowski’s might be useful, so here’s my attempt at applying it to one of my most recent shots of Woodbury Common.
The thing here is the track. It’s easily recognisable. We can see it’s a track through countryside, that both people and vehicles use it, that it comes from somewhere and goes somewhere and without considering the ambient conditions, it’s a very ordinary track indeed and that very ordinariness imparts a sense of familiarity. It’s the kind of track anyone might come to know.
The detail here, its ‘truth’ is those tracks. Not only do they animate the image and give it the dramatic lines, but they’re somewhat brutal. They remind the viewer that, even in such a beautiful setting, noise and management and people are at work: there is nothing ‘natural’ here. A narrative is – perhaps – suggested through the absent activity, and I would question Szarkowski’s assertion that photos don’t tell stories – that they are so frequently used to prompt them in creative writing workshops and therapy sessions suggests that any narrative absence is paradoxically an overabundance of possibilities.
The time here is a frosty morning. I’d chosen to be here to capture exactly this – the reddish light, the elegant blue frost tints. But it’s also, on a longer scale, the intensive heathland management practice of scraping topsoil which requires the heavy machinery. It’s also – implicitly – the time it took to make those tracks. Coming from a film background, which records time in a very different kind of way, I’m increasingly finding photography a much more supple and subtle way of registering time, and one that more actively engages the audience through inference.
Likewise, through segmenting the actual, the frame infers what cannot be perceived visually, and in this photography and film are very similar. It’s through frame that the previous elements – thing, detail and time – become arranged into an animate whole. It’s also through frame that this becomes very much my shot – I wasn’t the only one out on the common that morning taking photos of tracks and frost – but the way I’ve arranged the track, the gorse, the sky, to create a slightly dramatic, slightly abstract image is wholly mine. This is precisely, as Szarkowski says, ‘to quote out of context’.
Vantage point, the final characteristic, is an unusual one here for me. As I wanted to include the distant trees, I lifted my camera as high over my head as I could reach to take the shot. I’m not sure that comes across, however, and it was a purely aesthetic rather than thematic choice. That being the case, the vantage point appears to be – even if it actually isn’t – at about head high walking amongst landscape. It’s not in flight through a zoom, picking out a detail crouching down and scrutinising. The vantage point is that of a walker, any walker, out enjoying the morning, and this gives emphasis to the ordinariness of the scene and the track. The extraordinary – the frost, the morning sun – thus becomes accessible, commonplace, within the democratic realms of ordinary experience.
Szarkowski, J. 2007. The Photographer’s Eye. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Considering my own practice as a photographer, the concept of context is troubling, has been for some time, and is my primary motive for this Masters course. Since reconnecting with photography in 2008, my work has been framed almost exclusively by social media. First, from 2008 until around 2011, on Flickr, thereafter Facebook and additionally, from 2017, Instagram.
Troubling, as I have become increasingly aware of how this context has shaped and is shaping my practice and my emotional engagement with it. To no small extent, when I’m out with my camera, I’m rehearsing a role that will ultimately be performed digitally on social media. I’m thinking which shot will get the most likes. I’m thinking whether those likes will come from my individual style – my obsession with surreal shadows – or from conforming to contemporary picturesques such as sunset or edgeland exoticism. I want to move beyond this, to discover new contexts. I believe I have more to ‘say’ with my work, that the single-shot, scrolling brevity of social media is inadequate as a means of interrogating ideas about place and landscape, and that there are conversations about art, the record and land that I wish to join. Photography, like film, like literature, is performed somewhere and for somebody, and the place and audience set the terms of this performance. I want to shake up my ‘channel of consumption’ completely.
Where I am now is discussed in posts below. I’m experimenting. Learning. Growing. And just beginning to think about where – other than IG &I FB – my work might find an audience. It’s exciting but still – necessarily – vague.
The nature and intent of my practice is discussed in posts below. I’m a landscape photographer – I guess – but I like working in abstractions and details. I want to evoke the sensory experience, idiosyncracies, politics and history of the places I visit. I want to draw critically on established approaches – e.g. the picturesque, banal details a la Shore – and harness them to my thematic intentions.
At the moment, my work is consumed here, on IG, FB and that’s it! I’m hoping conservation charities will find a use for my work for promotion or evidence, either online or in print, and I’m interested in using my work in academic settings – whatever those are, and this is something I need to explore. I think my end goal is a book in which writing plays a crucial part. I’m currently investigating ways of turning my M5 motorway bridge project into a book. Early days, and I’ve no idea about format, audience, cost, or collaborations. These are all things I’m exploring but don’t really have anything worth discussing here.
My practice is interwoven with film work, and it’s possible I’ll be doing some filming on the commons I’m focussing on currently – possibly for money. I’m interested in the possibilities that photography opens out that film doesn’t, especially the very different experience of time through the two media. As an online project, of course, these two could co-exist. I’m interested, too, in interrelationships with text – also having a background in writing. I’m exploring works that chime with my own interests, such Joel Sternfeld’s sparse but eloquent text in On This Site and Campagna Romana, John Kippin’s Cold War Pastoral, which is interwoven with essays, and Dominick Tyler’s Uncommon Ground, a hybrid work that perhaps is closest to what I want to achieve. Critically, I’m embedding myself deeper in the traditions of landscape art through Andrews’ Landscape and Western Art, nature writing through Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, anthropology through Matthew Engelke’s Think Like an Anthropologist, critical geography through Doreen Massey’s For Space, and photography through Geoffrey Batchen’s Each Wild Idea. When I finish Batchen’s book, which I’m loving, I’ll write up a separate post reflecting back on it – as will I be reflecting in greater depth on my reading and photography research elsewhere in this journal.
Andrews, M. 1999. Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Batchen, G. 2002. Each Wild Idea. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Engelke, M. 2017. Think Like An Anthropologist. London: Pelican.
Kippin, J. 2001. Cold War Pastoral. London: Black Dog Publishing.
MacFarlane, R. 2016. Landmarks. London: Penguin.
Massey, D. 2005. For Space. London: Sage Publications Ltd.
Sternfeld, J. 1992. Campagna Romana. New York: Alfred A Knopf Inc.
Sternfeld, J. 1996. On This Site. Göttingen: Steidl.
Tyler, D. 2015. Uncommon Ground: A word-lover’s guide to the British landscape. London: Guardian Books.
I’m in the process of discovering the dimensions and uses of my practice. By dimensions, I mean the formal style, subject and tone of my work. Within the broad genre of landscape photography, my practice presently incorporates the abstract, the sensory-impressionistic, the unsettling, the picturesque and the documentary and I feel this needs some refining and focussing to bring these elements together, or by eschewing one in favour of another. I have a clear preference for bold lines but am developing a deeper engagement with texture and am in the process of learning more about colour, through experimentation and research, to help develop a more coherent, distinctive personal style. I am continuing to photograph commons and am deepening my relationship to the Pebblebed Heaths in East Devon and with Tunbridge Wells common. I also continue to photograph when walking elsewhere to train and develop my eye. My 18 month engagement with Exeter’s M5 bridge feels to be in its closing stages, other than to record seasonal events such as snow or the reeds in flower.
By uses, I mean the outputs for my work. I am presently developing ideas for my M5 photographs and believe a book with a strong written component would be the best end product, with an accompanying exhibition. I’m getting ideas and support from my network and considering how I might apply for AHRC funding for this. I’m in the process of setting up a 3 month project with Devon Wildlife Trust to provide material to promote Exeter’s Valley Parks, and which may include film as well as photography. I’m also in discussion with Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust, who manage Devon’s newest National Nature Reserve and will be launching as such publicly in May; our interests in sense of place exactly coincide and whether or not funding might be available for my work, the timing is fortuitous. I am also acquiring a working understanding of the principles of anthropology and learning how photography is used in ethnographic, especially sensory ethnographic, research beyond simply providing accompanying data or illustration.
In short, 2020 looks to be an interesting year for my practice.
My practice has three intentions. These overlap, and at times different intentions predominate or fade to the background.
First is as a way of exploring and investigating landscape, and this is an intention found throughout my life. Certain things I see, especially the idiosyncratic, grab my attention and whether through imagining, writing or photographing, I follow this attention. Photography is special because it has given me permission to be nosy, to linger, to scrutinise, to climb over fences and into bushes to deepen that attention. It is a license to look, to deepen my connection with a place, and my work is a record of that looking. This is a personal intention. My fascination with the M5 bridge over the River Exe is founded on this curiosity and, as entirely personal, can’t really be assessed for success or weakness.
Flooding at M5 Bridge, Nr. Exeter, 2019, Andy Thatcher.Flooding at M5 Bridge, Nr. Exeter, 2019, Andy Thatcher.
These two images express perhaps better than any my intention to explore. After December’s heavy rain, the fields around the bridge were under a considerable amount of water and I was excited to discover the aesthetic possibilities and also how a landscape I have come to know intimately was changed. Had I not been out to photograph, I would not have bought a decent pair of wellies and waded carefully into the flood water to take these shots. Doing so was thrilling.
This intention is phenomenological. It is about using artistic activity to immerse myself in a place, to understand it better and engage with it on a deeper level. Director Gideon Koppel took exactly this approach for his celebrated slow-cinema documentary sleep furiously, spending 10 months in rural Wales, amassing a vast amount of footage all the while, learning at a deep level about the triumphs of a community in crisis and discovering his own relationship to the landscape and its people. It was not Koppel’s aim was not to come to any conclusive idea about Trefurig, but to document and express his experience of and interest in it. Sleep furiously is a film at Trefurig, rather than about it, and this has been my artistic strategy during the making of my two previous films, and I am exploring was of applying this at-ness to my photography.
Second is to assemble a shot that pleases, whether through repositioning myself, or technological manipulations, either of the camera or in post-production. This is a formalist intention: I am interested in working with line, texture, colour, contrast. Past a certain point, I stop ‘seeing’ the contents of an image as having inherent meaning but as simply being visual forms. I have recently learned this is referred to in painting as ‘retinal’. This is generally a personal intention: I am aiming to create an image that aesthetically pleases through its ‘rightness’. When I feel I have a shot I’m happy with, I will share it, but I’m uninterested in others while I’m composing.
Falmouth University Penryn Campus, 2020. Andy Thatcher. Falmouth University Penryn Campus, 2020. Andy Thatcher.
These two shots, taken at Falmouth University Penryn Campus, illustrate successful and unsuccessful examples. Tree shadows are a fascination of mine, and one of my favourite things about late winter and early spring. The shadows are the central feature in both, and were what drew my intention. The contrast has accentuated the shadows here, and another of my other stylistic interests – bands of texture/ colour – is present in both. However, the shed photo, despite the interesting shapes of the shadows themselves, doesn’t work – the colour isn’t interesting and there aren’t other elements to balance the shadow. The wall photo works much better – the palette is pleasing, there’s an interesting dialogue between the air duct and the shadow, there’s hints of beyond the frame through the glimpsed shapes at the top and the windows, a sense of depth thanks to the road, and a simplicity added by the blue sky. The shed photo might work as a painting, but not as a photo, and this reminds me of the limitations of the medium.
This intention is formalist. It is about using manifest reality to explore the grammar of images and while I might point to other intensely formalist photographers, such as Paul Hart, it is the work of Matisse, and in particular his cut-outs, that I have in mind: the rearrangement of shapes through the viewfinder, the rebalancing of colour in Lightroom, this is a dance that recalls Matisse’s ongoing work across the walls of his hotel apartment suite in Nice in the final decade of his life, an artistic endeavour he likened to the reordering, pruning and arranging central to gardening. While there is less freedom, clearly, with photography, there is considerable scope for rearrangement of shape and texture prior to releasing the shutter and rearrangement of colour and light in post-production. Like Matisse’s cutouts, photography is itself a hybrid form. Like them also, digital photography’s form lends itself to provisionality and ongoing revision, making formal playfulness an inherent possibility.
Third is the intention to create a shot that evokes, and this does involve others because it is the communicative aim of the image. I might aim to evoke an idea – such as the legal fragility of public access to land – or I might aim to evoke a sensory or emotive experience – such as the wind through reeds, the wonder of a frosty dawn over flooded fields. I will occasionally take a picture solely for this purpose, and draw on the picturesque in doing so, simply because something I encounter suggests itself, such as a vista through an opening in a hedgerow; doing this is simply because I know it will cause pleasure for others.
Tunbridge Wells Common, December 2019. Andy Thatcher. Tunbridge Wells Common, December 2019. Andy Thatcher. Tunbridge Wells Common, December 2019. Andy Thatcher.
The view of Tunbridge Wells Common neither evokes nor provides an especially pleasing vista. The composition is fine, but the light and colour are uninteresting, and this demonstrates how views can often fail to evoke the places they capture where a less pictorial image succeeds – such as the second shot. I was very happy with this – it evokes both the season, the denseness of the wooded common, and also the sense of discovery, through the (very typically Kentish) buildings glimpsed in the background. It is, I hope, also pleasing, as I found the shape of the leaves against the dark background very elegant. The image of the tarp – the remnants of a hidden drug den – is both evocative of the thick, sinister holly and rhododendron undergrowth at the bottom of the common, and also evidence of conflicting ideas of land use, and manmade despoilation of the natural environment. I also like it aesthetically – the lines are dramatic – and it was this primarily which drew me to take it.
This balancing of the sensory and the political, of both experience and meaning of place, is central to the work of Fay Godwin, one of the first photographers I encountered whose work I believed I could learn something important from. Godwin’s interest, like mine, is not didactic – though her work is heavily political. She is drawn, she says, to land that has been ‘worked’, while ‘wilderness areas’ such as the American West, ‘have fewer resonances’. Speaking of photographing the Scottish Highlands, she talks in terms of getting across both the sense of bleakness, and also of strategically choosing viewpoints to combine different layers of history, such as a barrow and a castle. Godwin’s work is thus both at the places she photographs and very much about them.
During Informing Contexts I want to explore ways of translating and expressing phenomenological and ideological experiences of landscape, both my own and that of others, by theoretical research, close evaluation of other photographers’ work, and personal experimentation, including informal interviews. I want to deepen my awareness of the contemporary and historic aesthetics and ideologies of the landscape idiom across the visual arts. Aesthetically and technically, I want to deepen an understanding of the relationship between line and texture, colour manipulation and combination, the use of dusk lighting conditions, and the sequencing logic of series. I want this term to be about establishing a basis for future work, rather than conducting in-depth investigation. Likewise, I want my photography to focus on experimentation rather than refining towards a polished, finished outcome. I will continue to learn about commons, immerse myself in nature writing and engage personally with common land, including as a volunteer at the Pebblebed Heaths Conservation Trust. I have a considerable reading list and will continue to work my way through this, and develop any productive or promising new areas illuminated through course learning materials and activities.
Bibliography.
Buchberg, K., et al. (eds.) 2014. Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. London: Tate Publishing.
Godwin, F. 1990. Our Forbidden Land. London: Jonathan Cape.
Koppel, G. 2007. Documentary – the evocation of a world. Journal of Media Practice, 8. pp. 305-323.
Newland, P. 2016. sleep furiously: interview with Gideon Koppel. In Newland (ed.) British Rural Landscapes on Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. pp. 180-189.
Wood, J. 2014. Gideon Koppel. In Wood (ed.) Last Words: Considering Contemporary Cinema. New York: Wallflower Press. pp. 60-65.
Audiovisual works.
sleep furiously. [feature film] Dir. Gideon Koppel. Bard Entertainments, Van Films. UK. 2009. 94 mins.
The South Bank Show: Fay Godwin [TV episode]. Dir. Unknown. London Weekend Television. UK. 1986. 50 mins.
out of the picture 
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