Category: thinking about photography (Page 1 of 3)

North Dakota

9 January, 2021 / Sidewayseye / 2 Comments

I have long been fascinated by the American Road Trip. Brought up on a literary diet of Kerouac, Steinbeck and Pirsig and then aspiring to the photography of those photo wanderers Frank, Friedlander and Shore, I had always wanted to experience the back-roads of rural America.

Some useful apps for film photographers

5 September, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

Just a brief note on some useful smartphone apps that I use for my film photography (if that’s not an oxymoron) .

A Philosopher’s Photographer: Wynn Bullock

15 August, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 2 Comments

As a life-long learner and a ‘mature’ (i.e. old) student of Philosophy I find much to appreciate in the pictures and words of Wynn Bullock. Alongside Minor White, a more thought-provoking photographer you will struggle to find.

“Searching is everything – going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you“. ¹

Thomas Joshua Cooper – our relationship to things

21 June, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

It has always seemed to me that a photograph (and perception) is never just of a something. It is of ‘a something’ as a certain type of thing. Cooper’s photographs remind me of this insight.

On photographic style and signature

1 June, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

What is style? If there is such a thing, must we find one? Or should we be talking about a signature?

On Fay Godwin

12 May, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 2 Comments

I look at Fay Godwin photographs almost every day of my life. Four photographs hang in my sitting room and have been there for 25 years or so. Perhaps more than anyone, Fay Godwin’s work has been a perennial influence on me as a photographer.

You can’t expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years.
Fay Godwin

Later Godwin was to say that there is no such thing as a definitive picture

Boring photographs

18 March, 2020 / Sidewayseye / 1 Comment

A recent post by Bruce Robbins (‘The Online Darkroom”) entitled ‘Boring Photography’ got me thinking about the word ‘boring’ in the context of taking photographs …

Photography and Walking

1 October, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

Walking is not just exercise. Movement through a terrain affords us not only physical exploration but also a movement of mind and spirit…

Working the Landscape

30 September, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 2 Comments

Mention ‘landscape photography’ these days and many would immediately think of that style of photography that looks to the ‘beautiful’ or to the ‘sublime’ or to the ‘picturesque’ in our countryside. Perhaps we have Edmund Burke’s ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful‘ to blame for that.

Romanticism in landscape photography is nothing new of course. 19th century Romantic photography provided a position which enabled a counter-reaction into Modernism.

Solitude and Photography

8 September, 2019 / Sidewayseye / 0 Comments

There are times when I need to be alone to make pictures. This is one of those times. By alone, I don’t mean just physically alone. I also mean culturally alone – away from the photographs and influences of others.