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.
Continue readingCategory: thinking about photography (Page 2 of 4)
What is style? If there is such a thing, must we find one? Or should we be talking about a signature?
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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.
Continue readingYou 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
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 …
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Walking is not just exercise. Movement through a terrain affords us not only physical exploration but also a movement of mind and spirit…
Continue readingMention ‘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.
Continue readingThere 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.
Continue readingNo other photographer comes closer to what I aspire than Thomas Joshua Cooper. It’s not the pictures per se, or his photographic expeditions or his success that motivates me. It’s something more intangible. The closest I can come to describing the feeling of his work is ‘spirit of place’, although this phrase doesn’t quite encapsulate everything that I feel in his pictures.
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When I see the two words ‘Zen’ and ‘Photography’ together my in-built bullshit alarm starts to ring. An on-line search of the words ‘Zen’ + ‘Photography’ will retrieve ethereal long exposure landscapes and seascapes or articles about the need for an empty mind when pressing the camera’s shutter. And and so on. Empty indeed!
Continue readingThe Photographer’s Gallery‘s exhibition of Manuel Alvarez Bravo has me reaching for my copy of ‘Manuel Alvarez Bravo – Photopoetry’, a detailed study into his photography. I have long been an admirer of his work, but what really strikes me about Alvarez Bravo (“AB”) is his ability to keep all the genre plates spinning.
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