Changing weather
Sunday however, was a completely different kettle of fish, and there was blue sky - it was cold, but the rain wouldn’t stop me doing anything. Good job really, because I was quite sufficiently put down by my own creative block. I had set off to take some MF images, so landscape type, and also had another camera with me should some street snapping opportunities arise.
My first port of call was the McDonalds/petrol station I had photographed last weekend - the clearer weather meant that the proximity to the distinctive shape of Pendle Hill could be seen in the background.
Well, just about seen anyway. The photograph is really a little dull - it lacks something that the early morning light had given the week before and just goes to prove it’s all about the light. If I’m going to work this idea the way I’d like to see it, I really need to get back there in the right conditions.
After this, I headed up to the Forest of Bowland and the Whitewell estate. I’m not sure I faired much better here though. I took a small number of photographs with the Hassleblad and I’m suitably impressed with the visual properties of the camera, but I’m not really using it to the best of its abilities. Certainly I need to do something more to warrant the money that was spent on it.
Perhaps it’s the blue sky that is working against me - I’ve not really taken much without plenty of clouds, and it all feels a little too… mundane? No, well, yes maybe, but I like mundane. Clichéd? Probably. Too “biscuit tin”? Again, probably. I just feel disappointed. I’ve cropped them down and I’ll put them in the gallery, although I doubt that they’ll get much further. One thing worth noting I thin is that the cropped version of the upper of these two pictures has also had the horizon straightened - the square picture is what it was like as I had the camera properly levelled on the tripod, but it just felt a little odd when cropped down.
I also grabbed a few other shows with the little Fuji, which seemed to behave a little better for me today. Or maybe I just used it more carefully. The first of these two images brings together the urban emptiness I had been talking about with the original theme I had considered of rural sports. Again, in the background there’s Pendle Hill… For what it’s worth.
With the second image I was looking at the contrast of the old, sympathetic country building with the big red brick building behind, a nod I would say to the farming tradition and the lure of the countryside for the commuter in his Range Rover. Not sure I pulled it off in the slightest though.
All in all, a very disappointing foray out with the camera, and one that brings forth again a quote I have on a piece of paper on my desk - I copied it from Street Photography Now (p10), and it’s by Doisneau - “If I knew how to take a good photograph, I’d do it every time.” I guess my confidence is low at the moment, and it’s reflected in the images. I think I need to do a small unrelated project to refresh my thought processes, but at the moment I really don’t know what that should be.
+++UPDATE+++
I’ve subsequently been thinking some more about these images, especially those from the Hasselblad. Firstly, I think they’re perhaps a little “safe”, a little traditional - I still need to put my thoughts down from the reading of Liz Wells’ Land Matters, and perhaps this would help me here. The other thing is that, stylistically and narratively, I feel a little all over the place.
I have to become coherent and concise in what I’m putting forward. I still need a mini-project as a distraction/to freshen my photography up though.
Progress?
Without a hook, the three threads do tend to stand a little isolated, held loosely together by location. What I hope to do now is show a relationship between the vibrancy (perhaps not the right word, and I’ve been stung by this before) of the rural life and landscape and the comparative void of the more urban spaces that are being taken over by commuters rather than being lived in by those that work the land. I fall into this latter category, so it will be interesting to see what I come up with.
So, what I’ll be looking at will be:
Rural – the festivals and such showing the way people do still come together in some form of celebration of the rural heritage – I don’t mean for these to be all smiling and fun, but to also include a degree of the dogged determination to enjoy this aspect of the area (hence why “vibrancy” will be the wrong word to use before). I’ve probably got this covered with the selection of images taken already but I will hit another show or two in the meantime.
Urban – looking more at the decline of the urban area as a “community” whilst becoming more a place for people to live away from the big cities. I think “a loss of purpose” is what’s feeding my thoughts at the moment. My original thought was for street photography, and yes there may still be elements of this in the more traditional, widely upheld sense – this will still be the more difficult to fathom, but I feel like I’m getting more of a direction now. I’ll be looking some more at Street Photography Now and a few other sources for further inspiration. This does mean that some of the images I have taken to date are pretty unusable though.
Landscape – this will be a mix of the more “natural” landscape (accepting that there is, in truth, very little natural landscape remaining) and also something with the more obvious encroachment of man, be it the building of houses in what would have been green belt until a few years ago. I think I’ll be breaking out the Robert Adams books again too, as this fits in very closely with his take on photography.
I’ll be looking at potential crossovers between the strands, such as the urban landscape in Clitheroe that I snapped with the Fuji (but retaken with more care), which would blur the boundary between the Landscape, the Rural and Urban.
I’ll be trying to pull together the next instalment of the submission over the coming weeks (certainly before the end of March), together with a trial book layout this time.
First outing with the Hassie
The location I chose was the same as that visited yesterday with the Fuji compact. I wasn’t really happy with the results from the X10, but to be fair I wasn’t playing to its strengths; it’s not really designed as a “landscape” camera, and it wouldn’t be fair to compare it handheld against the Hasselblad on a tripod. I guess that’s what I’m sort of doing though.
At these scales, there’s not really much in the way of discernible difference, but I wouldn’t be happy printing the Fuji picture much above about an A5 (although I’ve not tried), but the Hasselblad photograph… It could easily go larger.
Yes, unfair to compare, and different focal lengths, ISOs, etc. so not really going to take this much further. The Fuji doesn’t need an expedition pack to use though, unlike the Hasselblad. I can’t remember the last time I took the big bag of bits out with me, but this time I had to.
The Fuji didn’t need any processing to get rid of hot pixels and sensor dirt either - dirt I expected to have to deal with on a semi-regular basis. Hot pixels I’m a little disappointed with to be honest - I’ll look into remapping the sensor later.
And finally, another photograph of the only McDonalds in the Valley:
It looks a little average at this scale, but much better when you see the full image.
I guess I won’t be using these images in their native square format as it would seem a little odd what with all the others being 3:2, but I might crop them down and add them to the galleries later.
Clitheroe
On the way to Clitheroe, I go past the only McDonalds in the whole Ribble Valley, something which I think is quite unusual - an area with a single McDonalds “restaurant” whereas there’s maybe 5 in the wider Preston area. This McDonalds restaurant is pretty much in the middle of nowhere too, it’s located at a “services” on the A59 - it’s a bit of a walk for the teens in Clitheroe to get to. Anyway, I thought I’d stop and take some photographs:
I’m not so sure I nailed this the way that I wanted, certainly not at these scales. I was using my Fuji X10 compact, which isn’t quite pushing my buttons at the moment. I’ve not quite gelled with it, which I find disappointing because I like the way the camera looks. Probably the wrong reason to buy I camera, but I’m a sucker for a looker. But anyway, I may have done a better job with my Canon, I’ve been thinking of selling this, which leaves me in a bit of a quandary. I think I’ll go back, maybe tomorrow morning with a “bigger” camera. But back to the current photographs.
In the same general area as McDonalds, they’re building some new houses, which would then give McDonalds some new customer potential - has the location been chosen for this reason, or is it just a fact that this is some land that the local councils have decided that it’s now possible to build on? This again ties in to some thoughts…
This sort of reminds me a little of Dewald’s Edge of the City series, but not quite so built up. There is no Suzhou in the Valley!
Anyway, in Clitheroe I was quite taken aback with the lack of people again - it’s not been easy to work in a “traditional” street photography mode. This was something I was perhaps slightly conscious of in the first instance; I knew there was no city in the area, so there would be nothing like when I go to London. But how quiet can a place be? Yes, there’s perhaps one or two people walking around the town centre, but not really that many. To be fair, this morning it was cold, as I mentioned before, and I didn’t hang around too long either. An idea is formulating though. I’ll go into this idea after the next few images.
Now, obviously these don’t follow the same methodology and style as the likes of Cartier-Bresson or the more contemporary Nick Turpin. Some are more akin to landscape photography, but there’s a thread of images that runs through books like Street Photography Now that I could perhaps tap into. What I’ve been thinking about is how the area has only seemed to come to life in the agricultural shows, etc. This ties in with something Gary Penny spoke about in the introduction to Mixed Blessings, of how the rural area is perhaps suffering from the influx of commuters, drawn to the idea of the countryside (“so long as it doesn’t smell badly or make too much noise first thing in the morning” Penny, p5). These commuters perhaps prefer the draw of the nearby larger towns and cities (Blackburn, Preston, even Manchester, etc.) rather than the small scale towns and villages of the region.
What I’m basically picking up on is the emptiness of the towns. It’s almost as if they’ve lost their purpose, and this can be seen in the empty shops, the lack of people in public spaces, etc. I’d like to bring this in to the urban thread, thus presenting the life of the Ribble Valley as being through the agricultural and rural traditions, contrasting with the void of the urban. And then blending the two together with views of the rural landscape. It still sounds a little confused, but these are just initial thoughts. If I do go on with this theme, there is a danger that it becomes urban landscapes, and I’m aware of this, so hopefully it won’t be a problem.
Let’s see where it goes.
Thoughts
On the one hand, this sometimes feels like my photographic voice is developing. Other times, it’s like I don’t know what my photographic voice is. I suppose this is also muddied by my collecting and looking at photobooks by varied artists, Martin Parr is very different to Moriyama Daido yet they will both exert some form of influence on me. And there’s many other photographers in the mix as well. My most recent acquisition is Korean photographer In Sook Kim’s book Saturday Night, which I was drawn to because, in some ways, it resonates with my Night Walks series. Ok, perhaps not much, but I see something. Will this book push me to develop this series any further, or has it already been consigned to my past? If so, what is my future? How will I tie that in to my current work?
When I first started this portfolio project, I was looking at capturing a mix of landscapes and images from the various festival gatherings within the Ribble Valley. I saw this as my chance to “connect” to the region in a way I hadn’t done previously in the 6 or so years I’d lived there. Yes, I’d been out and taken some photographs within the Ribble Valley, notably with the photographs taken for the Landscape module (Night Walks were all taken in the area, as were some of the roundabouts and the ‘one acre’ selection), but the Ribble Valley was somewhere I lived and commuted out of to work. When I started YOP, I was not working, I was able to step back and look at what actually goes on in the area where I live. I am the type of person that could lead to the disintegration of the Ribble Valley traditions, and I was keen to offset this somehow.
By nature, I’m a very shy person, at least until people get to know me (or I get to know others). This will always make the photography of strangers an anxious experience, and for that reason I sought out the festivals as I was quite sure there would be others there taking photographs; I’d feel far less conspicuous. By attending these festivals and fetes I felt I was taking part in the community that I had largely ignored previously. I took on board the words of Domon Ken (“the ‘absolutely unstaged snapshot’, through the mere tool that is the camera, is a method for connecting oneself directly to a society” - Vartanian) and felt I was indeed connecting, but it’s fairly clear that this isn’t “connecting” in the way that Ravilious or Penny have done. So, I feel now that “observing” would be a better way of phrasing what I have been doing – looking to the area known as the Ribble Valley and photographing what I see.
Whilst I’ve photographed what I have seen, I feel I’ve been pulled in a few different directions. Originally I wanted to photograph the landscapes I saw in a way that was influenced by my readings of Tolkien, who wrote some of his novels whilst visiting his son in the area. This I have done a couple of times, but to be honest I find my view of his “Middle Earth” has been tainted (or maybe just “influenced”) by the films and the majestic scenery of NZ. I will keep this in the back of my mind, but now my focus has changed, as indeed it needed to with the introduction of a third strand to the project.
My intention with the festival strand was always to be a little quirky – “English” if you like – but I’ve also found myself being heavily influenced by what I think people would expect to see (Ravilious, Penny, etc.) rather than what I actually want to photograph. I believe this lead to Jose labelling me as a social documentary photographer; a shock for me to hear. Yes, this is without doubt a documentary project, but would I consider myself a documentary photographer? Never in a million years! Well, not in the sense that I would use the term, which is of course potentially far and away from the usage Jose would give it.
Where is all this leading? Well, I’m going to try and do something more to my own vision, and hopefully this will then become more coherent as my view on my Ribble Valley. I’ve still got 2 more submissions in to the portfolio pool, so there is time for this vision to mature, and it doesn’t mean that everything I’ve done to date is wasted either, just that some of the images will drop away, as they would have done anyway (the clichéd view of the castle and the flag is one of the first to do so).
How will this affect the three strands of the portfolio? Well, they will remain essentially the same (landscape, fetes and street), but will likely begin to interweave more in a manner I’m comfortable with.
With the landscape theme, I’ll be looking to bring in something of the urban and the rural streams. There’s a danger that they will stand alone, and this was originally part of the plan – for the landscapes to be a form of punctuation. However, the landscape is obviously very important to the Ribble Valley – it’s named after the landscape after all – the valley through which the River Ribble flows. The Valley also has a good number of farms, so people make their living from the landscape, and there’s also tourism to the AONB in the Forest of Bowland, and also Pendle Hill and the famous witches from 400 years ago.
The rural festival theme is perhaps pretty wrapped up as this is what I concentrated on in 2011; however I will revisit one or two of the early festivals and get some more images, and see how I can perhaps interweave this into the landscape and urban themes.
The urban (street photography) theme is proving to be quite problematic. The area is not particularly heavily populated, so there’s not always something “going on”, so I’m trying to find interesting things happening that can tie in with the portfolio as a whole. Part of this will no doubt be more of an urban landscape approach, and the quirky things that can be seen in the villages sometimes. There’s also been the village fetes, which ties in with the rural festival theme.
Some of the photographs will perhaps become a little more “mundane” too – I think this is perhaps part of my “thing” – I’m attracted to the recording of the mundane in a way that might make it feel a little less so, whether it be seen as quirky or in some cases dramatic, poetic, just plain prosaic, or whatever. The fact that I didn’t try and sequence the first batch of photographs was perhaps something of a mistake, something I’ve tried to address with the sample “book” which can be found in an earlier post. I’ll do the same with each further instalment of the image pool, drawing on the full selection of images submitted to date, rather than just the latest batch.
I’m not entirely sure all this will work as I intended, but the next few months will surely tell.
Bibliography
Vartanian, I. Hatanaka, A. and Kamabayashi, Y (eds) (2006) Setting Sun: writings by Japanese photographers. New York. Aperture Foundation