Category photography

Magic. Illusion. Void.

unpopularuk 1 Comment

Last week we looked at Amanda Harman’s photographs of the Somerset Levels and it occurred to me that really I ought to have mentioned Peter Benson’s novel which had such an enormous impact on me when I first read it all those (thirty two!!) years ago. Back in 1987 the landscape aspects of the novel certainly did not affect me as much as the narrative, yet there was certainly something beguiling and magical about it all that led me to pore over OS maps of Somerset, orientating myself around the place names and references in Benson’s words. Strange perhaps then that despite moving from the South West of Scotland to the South West of England five years after reading the book, the Somerset Levels remained (and remain still) something of an ignored treasure. Something to do, perhaps, with being just outside easy travelling distance, particularly as I only learned to drive in 2014, and perhaps too because there is a desire to keep the mystery caged and wrapped up in words and imaginations.

I have cycled across parts of the Levels in recent years, on solo sojourns and as part of the Bristol Belter sportive ride, yet I admit that when I am on my bicycle my thoughts are primarily about the process of cycling and only rarely, fleetingly, connect to the landscapes through which I am moving. The movement is the thing, and I have often wondered how I might go about using cycling as a process in which to fit art. My ‘tiny moments’ writing project of a few years ago is probably as close as I have got, although if there was some way of being able to make photographs or drawings whilst cycling in the same way I have done on train journeys then perhaps I would do so. Perhaps too I should simply admit to the fact that for me at least the act of cycling remains explicitly ABOUT the act of cycling and nothing else.

One of my most regular cycle routes takes me along the Exe valley, past Dulverton and up towards and occasionally onto Exmoor. On that route I often pass the Bridgetown cricket club and it’s delightful looking clubhouse/pavillion. I have never stopped to make a photograph of it (see above about the movement being the thing. I hate stopping on a ride even to refill bottles and much prefer eating on the move to stopping in a cafe) but you can see a glimpse of it on Google’s Global Surveillance Project (aka Streetview). Every time I pass it I think it would be fun to do a project around clubhouses before figuring that someone probably already has, or is doing so. I’m sure I stumbled on a blog at one point where someone was documenting village cricket pavilions of England and it delights me to see that Amanda Harman has built a body of work herself around a similar notion of clubhouses.

Harman’s Clubhouse images are varied in terms of the activities and sports they serve yet are all united by the absence of the people involved. What we see are the spaces devoid of the individuals who create them. We see the objects they leave behind them, sometimes related to the activity (a green fixtures book on a burnt sienna table top; cricket bats and pads on a changing room bench) but more often universal (a bar stool and a mobile gas heater; washed dishes draining beside a kitchen sink; assorted chairs; towels hung beside sinks). There is something of a fragile fragmented determination in these spaces, a sense of time draping gently into a distant past mixed with a hesitant hope extending into the future. These spaces are clearly communal yet we see them emptied of the chatter and shared experience of people. Instead the memories of moments linger in the air, unseen and unspoken but marvellously real. For me the photographs immediately bring to mind a scant few years of my youth spent at the long disbanded and dismantled Troon Sailing Club, dragging boats up and down the beach and slipping into the forbidden spaces of the clubhouse as a pre-teen waiting for my father to come back from his races on Tornadoes. I suspect these emotional attachments are, like those dishes on the draining board or the towels next to basins, universal. Many of us will have such memories and connections to fall back into and build upon on seeing these photographs. It’s one of the ways in which photographs should work, after all.

Elsewhere in Harman’s work we see shots under a collective title of Tidal Reach and here too are the tendrils of memory that reach back to my sailing club moments. The water, the sands, the horizon and the unflinching skies. My favourites of these images are the ones which are most formally constructed in terms of horizontal planes for these conjure thoughts of Rothko paintings and begin to enter the meditative realm of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes. Is it possible for anyone to make photographs of seascapes and not have Sugimoto’s work drawn in as a reference point? Probably not, but this is fine for there are surely none better.
I have come very late to Sugimoto’s work and this may be to do with the slow dissolve of an instinctive mistrust of spiritual meditation which has accompanied me for most of my life. In recent months however I have become ever more drawn to his work, intrigued by the notions of time within his long-exposure images. Our instinctive response to the function of photography is to see it as the freezing of fragments in time, a vehicle in which to store memories. I have found that this is one of the hardest barriers to overcome when teaching photography at GCSE level to teenagers. It is perhaps analogous to the development of the brain and connects to the way in which most teenagers cannot get past an infatuation with ‘accurate’ recording regardless of the medium.

It is a long time since either Sugimoto or myself have been teenagers (and I for one heave a sigh of relief that this is the case) so perhaps this helps explain a move away from an infatuation with freezing moments and instead looking at ways to acknowledge time as perhaps the crucial dimension as a factor in our experiencing (and hence recording) the world around us. The most obvious response to the dimension of time is the moving image, and whilst this is intriguing in its way it feels somehow too real to be real. Only at its extremes, like with Warhol’s film of the Empire State Building, does the moving image really, ahem, move me. More interesting by far are the ways in which illusions of time are captured within the single, still image. Sugimoto is a modern master of this and his theatres work is simply breathtaking in both its conceptual and formal execution. Ditto the seascapes and particularly the Revolution development which (literally) moves the composition on its side, further into the realms of abstraction and, if we can bring in this idea again, of meditative spaces. And here is that connection to Rothko again, taking into account the Rothko chapel and the supreme meditative space of the Rothko room at the Tate in London (personally I have much fonder memories of the paintings within the ‘original’ Tate Britain than in their ‘Modern’ context but I appreciate this is more than likely down to where I first experienced them). Even within the context of the printed photo book Sugimoto’s work resonates with an otherworldly presence. These images vibrate and send tingles of electricity down the spine precisely because there is almost nothing there. The lightness of most of the seascapes is such that they almost literally become weightless whilst the darkness of the Revolution series echoes that depth of void hinted at in Sarah Jones’ rose bushes. These photographs draw us is, envelope us in their delicious emptiness. They seem to say that only in nothing can there be something; the only thing real is unreal. Magic. Illusion. Void.

In The Black

unpopularuk Leave a comment

I have been doing work for ‘my’ GCSE photography project and, inspired by Sarah Jones’ work, I have been playing with mirror diptychs and the notion of ‘black on black’ (this draws in connections to Ad Reinhart and Kasimir Malevich too, of course). The ‘content’, in case you are wondering and can’t make it out (if you can’t, that’s partly the point) is 1/32 scale plastic soldiers, which means the photographs are also at least partly about the muddied waters of nostalgia and loss. I’m also intrigued by the inverse of this, which would be intentionally overexposed shots, perhaps like Malevich’s white on white squares, so in other words letting so much light into memories that they literally burn up in the process… Anyway, here are the photographs. (I’m actually delighted by the fact that the thumbnails just look like black rectangles.)

Dancing In The Dark

unpopularuk 2 Comments

For a few years there I had fallen out of touch somewhat with what the Caught By The River crew were doing. Sure, I’d still occasionally drop in and read the Antidotes To Indifference series for some recommendations of things to listen to and read; and sure, I’d always try and read anything Kevin had published on there but still, I always had some nagging feeling lurking away in the corners of my soul that cynically harboured fears that all this interest in ‘nature’ was somehow contrary to all my instincts and was little more than following trends.

The Claim sang that being wayward and cynical never left a lasting impression and I know that’s true but there are things we perhaps cannot change about ourselves no matter how hard we attempt to shift our habits. Lord knows I’ve been trying though and one of my habits from the past six months or so has been to follow through on the few subscription emails I receive (GDPR has been a pain in the ass in many respects but sheesh, it’s certainly had the effect of making ‘unsubscribe’ requests actually work) and checking out the Caught By The River site on a regular basis has been one of those.

All of which is by way of telling you how I came across the photographs of Amanda Harman, whose shots of the Somerset Levels have been published by Another Place press. The work, under the title of ‘A Fluid Landscape’ is a collection that mostly pays attention to the closer rather than the wider landscape and this is something that very much appeals to me. Harman’s photographs of grasses and plants lying partially submerged, sometimes with reflections of overhanging foliage and the broad strokes of boughs are very much my favourites in the book. One sequence of five or six pages is especially appealing, containing as they do compositions that show spots and lines of colour and tone within flat planes of water. The first are on a ground of milky white, like miso soup in a china bowl. These photographs remind me of Cy Twombly’s ‘Quattro Stagioni’ paintings and whilst they look lovely in the intimate context of a small format photobook I long to see them displayed as large prints. The shots which follow these in the book are literally by contrast on an inky black ground, the arc of stems dipping and disappearing into inner space. Simple gestural lines score the canvas. A sly dab of colour and then on… on to more complicated compositions of reflective pools that bring to mind Jem Southam’s glorious Painters Pool or River Exe bodies of work, and surely Southam is an inspiration or at the very least an inescapable reference point to any photographer working with landscape?

Getting back to those beautiful compositions of black water though, and I have to say that immediately I saw these I was put in mind of the spectacular photographs of rose bushes by Sarah Jones. Jones has been a favourite of mine ever since I stumbled on some of her work in the Tate Britain back in 1997 and whilst I have not yet seen her rose bush work in the flesh, as it were, I would very much like to savour the physical presence of her large scale prints. Now in one of those delicious coincidences that are really more about the laws of statistical probability, I had a book of Jones’ work on my desk yesterday when my friend Megan Calver visited. Megan has recently had work in the Materiality: Provisional States show at Hestercombe and it turns out that Jones had her rose photographs displayed in the same gallery in 2015 as part of the ‘Double Take’ show and that Megan was very much a fan too. I’m bitterly disappointed that I had not picked up on that show and frustrated too that the pressures and commitments of work seem to so often result in a kind of paralysis that leads to a failure to connect with the world outside of that of books and records and photographs. And if that sounds terribly self-indulgently self-pitying it is not really meant that way, for that commitment to the life inside feels ever more important in the light of contemporary history. We all build our walls and find our tiny cores of comfort, after all. It is probably opportune now too to throw in the fact that my cousin Gordon Faulds was artist in residence at Hestercombe in 2006 and to my shame I have never made the leap across the border into Somerset to touch base and share thoughts. Again, this says much more about that inner paralysis and commitment to the interior life than anything else but there we are.

Getting back to Sarah Jones’ photographs then, it strikes me when I look at these rose images that what appeals about Jones’ (and Harman’s) work is that these photographs flatten the picture plane and surrender themselves to the pragmatic reality of photography as a two-dimensional medium. Illusions of three-dimensions (or four dimensions) in a two-dimensional plane have their place of course, but the more I look at and think about landscapes it is clear to me that these illusions are not ones that particularly appeal to me. In these photographs by Jones and Harman depth is psychological as much as it is physical. The blackness in Harman’s shots is that of watery depth, clearly hinted at yet treated with a flatness that is mute and impersonal. Jones’ blackness meanwhile is literally that of blindness, of a world left intentionally underexposed. There is a world behind these roses but Jones hides it from us. We imagine there must be other plants, expanses of cultivated wilderness, suburban sprawl perhaps, but it is all just that: imaginary. In these photographs Jones plays with the illusion of depth and admits to the magic trick, like Springsteen’s delicious quip at the start of his Broadway show. Like Springsteen too, Jones (in the case of the rose photographs, literally) shines a spotlight on details and illuminates these in art. Jones has said something about her photographs being glass plates placed over the world to facilitate close examination and really Springsteen’s songs do the same. Each looks at details and draws out lines of gesture and suggested narrative. Dancing in the dark, indeed.