Portraiture

Portrait photography has never really been my thing.  In many ways the most important part of my photography is the time alone.  Life is busy and it is a privilege to spend time on my own, collecting my thoughts and challenging myself creatively.  I am immensely grateful to my loving and understanding wife Valerie for ‘getting’ this.

The idea therefore of taking photographs of people seems to be the opposite of this.  I hugely admire the expertise of portrait photographers and their creativity.  I suppose that portrait photography is an easier path to recognition as some of the most famous photographs of all time seem to be of people.  I am not always correct in what I ‘suppose’ but that is how I feel.

Late last year on a quiet Sunday afternoon I watched a documentary on Jane Bown.  Jane was a photographer for the Observer newspaper and shot her subjects using an Olympus OM1, black and white film (I think Kodak Tri-X) and natural light.  There is an immense sense of quiet in Jane’s work and I could never do it any justice in trying to describe it.  Best to check it out directly - http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2014/dec/21/jane-bown-a-life-in-photography-in-pictures

Feeling inspired by Jane’s work I decided to shoot more portraits.  I have always turned down requests to shoot photographs of birthdays or weddings as I don’t feel that connection but that afternoon changed my mind.  I realized that portrait photography could produce the same emotion as my landscape work but the subject matter would need to be perfect.

So I’ve bought a portrait lens.  I will be trying to capture the same quiet moments that I aim for in landscape photography.  I will be looking for the scenes where you can feel a strong connection to the subject.  So far, I have been concentrating on black and white photographs but I have been shooting both film and digital. 

This is not a new direction for me.  I am not bored with landscape photography and I do not wish to commercialise this work.  I hope that I create moments of beauty.  I hope I can produce photographs that tell a story.  I hope that I can come close to finding that elusive light that Jane Bown captured so effortlessly. 

Nanny's love

Difference of opinion

mel·an·cho·li·a

ˌmelənˈkōlēə/

noun

deep sadness or gloom; melancholy.

This is a pretty standard definition of melancholia.  I'm not sure I agree.  I have heard many people describe my photographs as having an air of melancholy to them.  That pleases me because that is what I feel when I am shooting.  I want to capture a depth to places and scenes that is perhaps missed by the causal observer.  The photographs have to have weight and emotion.  They must touch a chord with the viewer.  I want them to leave an imprint rather than be transitory. 

tran·si·to·ry

ˈtransəˌtôrē,ˈtranzəˌtôrē/

adjective

not permanent.

Maybe I am lost in my words.  I listen to music that could not be described as happy, or shiny, but could certainly be described as beautiful.  Ludovico Einaudi for example - I would say there is an air of melancholy to his music.  It is perhaps hauntingly beautiful.  That could be description I am looking for but I am searching for one word to sum this feeling up.  The closest that my vocabulary takes me is melancholia.

It would seem therefore that I have a difference of opinion.  With whom I'm not sure.  There may be some wisdom out there that can enlighten me and provide me with the word that I need to fill this lexical void.  If I was less bothered about the word (and about sounding pretentious), I'm sure I would settle with a description of my photographs as 'beautiful'.

beau·ti·ful

ˈbyo͞odəfəl/

adjective

pleasing the senses or mind aesthetically.

TIME

There are many reasons why you wouldn't want to shoot with film. It is time consuming, can be messy and you have to be patient. You have to be patient because the results are anything but immediate. Sometimes you wait weeks from shooting the photograph, through finishing the roll, developing, scanning, printing, etc. etc. etc.

So why do it?

For me it is very simple. I love the aesthetic quality of film. Some may argue that it is not as sharp as digital - but that is the point in my opinion. As someone once said (HCB) "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept".

I don't need immediacy. Looking through a set of negatives or scans is a little like opening a Christmas present. There is the excitement of what you are going to discover, the hope that it will live up to your expectation and (sometimes) the joy of getting exactly what you wanted.

When a 64 year old camera and some fast grainy film produces an image like this I feel like all my Christmases have come at once.

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A thousand words

I love to study the work of great photographers.  I look at their work with a degree of curiosity, searching for the element that makes their work special.  Quite often there is an indefinable quality that sets them apart.

Recently, I have been analysing the work of some of the Magnum Photographers.  One of the privileged members of this elite group is Paul Fusco.  In 1968 Paul Fusco was assigned to accompany the train carrying Robert Kennedy's coffin from New York to Washington DC.  Along the way, Fusco shot images of ordinary American people who paid their respects as the body of the presidential candidate passed.  There is one photograph that stopped me.  It shows a family who seem to be working on the land - mother, father and five children.  They have temporarily halted their work to silently stand in tribute to the assassinated Mr Kennedy.  What I find particularly compelling about the image is the condition of the family. Each of them (apart from the mother) appear dirty and dishevelled and it would appear that these were hard times in America, yet this family took time from earning whatever living they could from the land to pay their final respects.

It is the storytelling nature of this image that has caught my attention.  The family may not have been working on the land.  It could well be that the father was just home from his blue collar job for the day and the kids were dishevelled as they were playing outside (it was summer in America).  Each of the family members stand straight and tall with their hands by their side, perhaps at the direction of their father. Whatever the circumstances, you can feel the grief of the nation in that photograph.  The family's economic fortunes are perhaps inconsequential, but the photograph begs you to wonder what they were.  The photograph was taken from a moving train and is therefore not sharp.  The composition is dictated by the proximity of the family to the train and the light is what was available.  Paul Fusco was not in control of a large number of the elements but he still took a great photograph - and that's what makes a great photographer.

https://www.magnumphotos.com/Asset/-2S5RYDWT0910.html

The Sea, The Sea

The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.  Isak Dinesen

I confess that I am deeply in love with the sea. The tides pull on me in the same way that the moon pulls on them. I have a clock in my house that tells me when the tide is flooding or ebbing. I look at it constantly. Tomorrow morning I will be back at the water's edge - watching sunrise and high tide combined. What a glorious combination.

At times in my life when I need to be alone I go to the sea.  When I want to think about my father I will watch the ebb and flow of the tides.  When I can't be at the sea I dream about it.  I dream about vast beaches on distant planets where the tide only comes in and goes out every 500 years.  I dream about the smell of the sea air on those planets.  A vague and elusive memory that grows with huge noise of crashing waves when the ocean turns and begins its long journey back to the shore. 

There is no reason for my addiction that I can offer as an explanation.  I do not sail and it has been years since I last caught a fish.  Perhaps it is the power and the fury of a storm that enchants me.  Perhaps it is the deep dark beauty.  Perhaps it is the restless nature of the sea, constantly moving like a forgotten warrior searching for his one true love.  Whatever the reason, it has a hold on me and I cannot tear myself free, nor do I want to.

93 million miles

Actually 92,955,807 miles to be precise.  This is the average distance between the Sun and the Earth.  This is the distance that electromagnetic waves of light need to travel to provide us with light, heat and energy.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.   Light would travel around the equator 7.5 times in one second but it takes 8 minutes to reach us from the Sun.  So when you look (carefully) at the Sun you are actually looking back in time to how the Sun looked 8 minutes ago.

The next nearest star is Proxima Centauri.  It is 4.22 light years away.  Therefore, it takes the light from Proxima Centauri almost 4 years and 3 months to reach the Earth.

There are approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 billion trillion) stars in the visible universe.  Once you start multiplying all these numbers out to try to calculate the scale of the universe you begin to raise how small we are.

Why is this relevant?  Well without any of this light, photography would be impossible.  Now i know what people mean when they 'thank their lucky stars'.