A new series for 2020 Photo London.
For what seems like a long time I have looked for intense, peaceful moments in landscape. This desire has led me to many places in the British Isles. For the most part I have gravitated to woodlands, rivers and salt marsh, generally avoiding higher ground. The reason for this is not because I dislike a good view, but rather because this camera and lens has a fantastic ability to make you feel you are part of the scene you are photographing. It’s to do with perspective I think; the complicated relationships between foreground and background
In these new pictures I have become interested in how far I can pursue this idea of immersion when looking at vast open spaces of simply air water and cosmic activity.
They are all taken close to home overlooking the North Sea at moments of intensely high atmospheric pressure.
The fleeting nature of ‘place’ in tidal landscape.
More cosmic than organic.
Anglia is a series that juxtaposes aspects of East Anglian history and landscape. Medieval brass memorials of knights in armour, early fenland water pumps of exquisite mechanical beauty and American Bomber cockpits in deep blue moonlight come together to evoke a place of fantastical adventure.
2013
Hey Charlie is a celebration of fifty years of Cory Wright’s involvement with a particular bend in a river and the field beside it. These joyful images are the culmination of a lifetime of experience of the place in which he grew up and to which he has stayed connected throughout his life.
As reflected in the title. Cory Wright calls his brother’s name – a child’s shout, an adult’s beckoning – to coax him into causing a stir in a place they know so well. They are allowed once again to be little gods. They create interruptions in the otherwise placid landscape; set off rockets into an evening sky; peer inquisitively into a haze of smoke creeping around a river bend. These striking and transient impulses, and the photographs in which they are captured, were intended to shake off the burden of the past and of nostalgia, and to provoke the making of new memories; to re-imagine, reshape and reawaken a much-loved place.
2011
“This camera reveals a strong sense of place. I am intrigued by its ability to drink in and reveal such detail. In this series I want to use this almost tangible, realistic quality of the photograph to explore notions of the imagination, the ethereal and the unspecific. What are the places we think and dream of? What are the landscapes of our mind? I chose to photograph places therefore that I had a strong perception of even before I had been there.
This is therefore less about specificity, time and place… more about breadth, emotion, preconception… and having a ‘place in mind'”
HCW
2016. A series of drawings and photographs of saltmarsh in North Norfolk.
Book available here.
Concentrating on the feeling of density in a place.
A six month circular tour through the landscape of the British Isles. Starting off at the spring equinox in Shetland, down through the borders into Northumberland, Yorkshire then out west to Cornwall. The journey started off as document to list the variety of sights we see in the British landscape, but soon became a personal of quest to find its very heart. Southern England through a hot midsummer before back north west to the black granite of Skye and all its sense of place and prospect.
Saltmarsh here in North Norfolk. Here it is at high tide and at sunset of course… which is always a fine combination. Inky blue springs to mind.
Place in Mind as a concept of photographic approach originally started with the sense of excitement generated by the process of imagining a place to photograph; a place to have to get to with the big camera. The thrill of the imagined response to somewhere that I may have been to and to which I about…
The waking to a familiar place newly transformed by a touch of snow is a beautiful thing indeed.
Maybe its just the photographic process but sometimes what is not really a place, becomes a place as you take the picture. Here we are after all… amongst it all.
Always interested in how you give a place a sense of something future; a notion of what might happen rather than what HAS happened. Or what is hidden perhaps. Can’t seem to get WordPress to get these thumbnails in the right order … but you get the idea; a stake in the ground, hidden. Its…
I’ve got a picture of this place….on a cloudier day… this looks definitely summer. When I was there, up above where this picture was taken, I spotted someone walking up the hill and slipping a small metal tin from beneath this large rock….scrrrrrape…. metal on granite. He was geocaching… a phenomenon not around early 60’s(?)…
.. from the May edition of Bazaar. There are others in this section of the website
These guys were great. It was part of a series of 3 new pictures for new June issue Bazaar. Alice Temperley and her gang, Michael and Emily Eavis and Charles Hazelwood at Glastonbury Abbey. What’s interesting is that I covered each shoot on digital and 10 x8 inch negative… 3 sheets of film on each….
In the Big Hole museum in Kimberley South Africa. This is at the height off the diamond rush… all those pulleys! Now its just a… big hole.
South Ronaldsay. Orkney… in July