A few feet away

Last week, browsing in one of my favourite London bookshops - Koenig Books on Charing X Road - I came across a rather beautiful volume of photographs by Paul Strand, the renowned photographer whose work I'm ashamed to say I'm not very familiar with. The book is called The Garden at Orgeval and consists of black and white images of his garden in France, taken in the last years of his life - nothing spectacular at first glance, but beautifully composed quiet studies of plant forms and shapes.

From The Garden at Orgeval by Paul Strand

What led me to examine the book more closely was Strand's quotation on the opening page:

"The artist's world is limitless.
It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away.
It is always on his doorstep."

It is something which immediately struck home - how we are often blind to what exists under our noses, preferring the exotic, unusual or unfamiliar. It's certainly easier to make interesting work far from home - just being in a new or unknown location sharpens the photographer's eye. But surely it can be just as rewarding to observe and document our immediate surroundings, the stuff of everyday life in all its familiarity.

In The Gravity of Time, the introductory essay to the book, photographer Joel Meyerowitz explains how when he first came across this book as a young man, he thought the photographs were a bit dull and simple compared to Strand's iconic earlier work, and that Strand had 'probably lost his nerve and succumbed to some sort of visual ennui'. Only when he was approaching the same age as Strand was then, did Meyerowitz 'get it', understanding that a deep visual communion with the natural world was probably something you only appreciate with age. Artists throughout the centuries have tended to pare down their work in their later years and Meyerowitz proposes that perhaps it is a 'winding down of ambition and the measuring of the time that is left that draws them to this simplicity, within which lie the subtle complexities of nature often hidden from the eyes of the young.' You can listen to him reading the essay here

This is a tendency I've noticed in my own practice though I don't claim to have any deep communion with nature. As I get older my priorities seem to be changing. Instead of heading out to the street with my camera, I find my attention turned towards making still life photographs at home, using the objects I find to hand to create compositions which resonate with a personal meaning. However, I do wonder whether the reason for this is sheer laziness rather than any deepening of insight - it takes effort to go out and photograph in the city! I also struggle a bit with the kind of work featured in this book.  Close-up studies of nature - the kind of thing beloved by macro enthusiasts - don't particularly inspire me.

So this morning, I thought I would go out into the garden and see if anything caught my eye on my own doorstep. At this time of year, there is not much to see - a lot of brown branches and bare earth, the tangled remains of last year's growth. Yet there are still a few little traces of colour and some welcome signs of spring's imminent arrival. This is an exercise I have tried in the past - trying to draw inspiration from unpromising material - and is probably something I should do more often. Looking closely brings its own rewards.

Six of the best.....urban

Looking through my archive I've discovered a distinct lack of urban photographs this year which, given that I have said I am 'inspired by the rhythms of the city', doesn't give a very true picture of my normal photographic practice! I'm not sure why this is, because I spend just as much time as ever in the urban environment, possibly even more.  I think perhaps this calls for a New Year's Resolution along the lines of 'take more pictures of the city' because out of all the photographic genres, urban is the one I am most drawn to.  The city is an endlessly recycled canvas providing a ceaseless source of changing subjects, potentially a creative inspiration which I must make more use of.

I deliberately use the term 'urban photography' and not 'street photography' which these days more often than not seems to involve people in amusing or unlikely situations - once you 'get' the picture, there is little more to be understood from it. I am more interested in the architecture of the street - the signs and symbols, the detritus and the traces of activity, ambiguous juxtapositions and reflections, which go to make up the complex layers of city life....

Open Skies

Don McCullin is not normally a name associated with landscape photography, being more well-known for his war photography and urban images. Yet his book Open Skies which I have been dipping into this week, is full of the most wonderful, impelling black and white landscapes. The photographs, shot on film and printed dark as dark can be, are mainly of the Somerset Levels where McCullin settled after many years photographing the worst atrocities and harrowing scenes in war zones all over the world. This is not the standard picturesque vision of the English landscape, with summer sunshine and fluffy clouds. They show a windswept, stark expanse of countryside in winter, under dark and louring skies, and must surely be an expression of an anguished soul trying to come to terms with what he has been through. In the preface, McCullin states

"After photographing wars and revolutions for two decades, the memories of those painful years nearly always try to spoil my days, even now, here in England....My solace lies in recording what remains of the beautiful landscape of Somerset and its metallic dark skies, which give this county an aged and sometimes remote feeling as if the past is struggling against the future. The stillness of silence and sometimes my loneliness provoke my imagination, but, like the surrounding land, I am fighting to release the past in me."

I often struggle with the idea of a landscape expressing the photographer's emotions but in this case, there is no doubt that they do.  McCullin is a modest man not given to discussing the 'meaning' of his pictures - in the introduction to the book, novelist John Fowles compares his reticence with the "many photographers these days who, not satisfied with simply printing their work, have to develop it in a totally unnecessary linguistic darkroom and puff it in fashionable art-gallery jargon.  That murky slough of turgid self-justification.... Don expects his images to be their own commentary, like all decent artists." This was written in 1989 - imagine what he would have to say these days with the plethora of mind-numbing 'artist statements' which 'challenge, explore and interrogate' ad infinitum! This is work which stands on its own without the need for words. Inspiration indeed.

         

All photographs Don McCullin from Open Skies.

Regeneration

A new blog and fresh inspiration......well, hope springs eternal!  The death of the year beckons: Autumn is traditionally perceived as the season of melancholy but in its slow decay and darkening days are to be found the seeds of next year's regeneration - the perfect time, then, to start a new blog.

Previous blog incarnations were either specific to a particular project, fell by the wayside through neglect or simply died a natural death.  A certain amount of discipline is required to maintain a blog on a regular basis and I find it difficult to photograph to order. Recently I feel I have lost my way somewhat, not getting the same pleasure I used to from the act of photographing. I need to rekindle my waning inspiration and pull myself out of the rut I have been ploughing.

By examining not only my own work but the work of others, I hope to rediscover the joys of photography, in the process challenging myself to put new ideas into practice as well as revisiting old work with fresh eyes. My ideas come thick and fast, but most remain unrealised, either through laziness, lack of time or poor organisation.  I flit like a butterfly from project to project so have decided to make a virtue of my lack of focus and put it all down here in the hope that something concrete will emerge. Who knows - it may lead to a completely new direction or simply a reappraisal of what is important to me.

Watch this space.....