Flight · James Lomax: Photography and Ideas

Flight

Wednesday October 19, 2005

Chorlton Meadows Dream: A Photography Project: Wandering is the way we discover the world - Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong What is truth? says Pilate, Waits for no answer; Double your stakes, says the clock To the ageing dancer; Double the guard, says Authority, Treble the bars; Holes in the sky, says the child Scanning the stars. - Louis MacNeice Space has a spiritual equivalent and can heal what is divided and burdensome in us - Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace Of Open Spaces This article shows the intellectual intentions underlying my photographic project, based on…
Book Review: The Fountainhead: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand is what I call a philosophical novel. I read them occasionally and before Lancaster University – when I took a year off – I read Hesse, Camus and Sartre partly for pleasure and partly to prepare myself for study. My favourite course was Philosophy and Literature when we examined Hamlet, Voltaire, and a section of Sartre’s Nausea. I got First Class grades for several essays in Renaissance Literature, and spent…
City Space And Chorlton Meadows: There are different kinds of geographic and cultural space. Private space of the home, public space of the street, and intermediary space of various kinds. After working in Manchester libraries for nearly three years, I am struck by the nature of such an intermediary space: that it is contested, with conflicting agendas between staff, other staff, and the public. I was once confronted for example with an irate relative concerning the misbehaviour of a young…
The Consolation Of The Hills: Great Gable: I grew up in the London suburbia of Kent bordering agricultural fields and with the help of a bicycle, pleasant rural areas. It was far from idyllic but the presence of nature was there, and I wonder about a boyhood where this is not so. I could see fields from my bedroom window, and cabbages grew the other side of my school fence. One of my delights was cycling along country roads in the summer,…
Pyrenees Comparisons And Walking Advice: A wilderness is rich with liberty – William Wordsworth We cannot do without the real thing, the real real thing; because without the real we die as if of thirst – J. M. Coetzee I’ve been to the Pyrenees four times. The first was unsatisfactory, with bad autumnal weather in Lescun and very little walking. The last three trips contained a great deal of walking, mostly but not entirely along the HRP or Haute Route Pyrenees. In…
Pyrenees Mountains: August 2011: Arrival My Pyrenean walking in 2011 effectively began when I arrived at a worldwide religious centre. Lourdes in the south of France, is a quiet little airport receiving specialist pilgrim flights from Manchester. I’ve been through it three times and it takes just minutes to collect your baggage and then when I got outside this year, a bus was leaving immediately for town. The journey takes about twenty minutes, cutting through French agricultural fields. On the…
From The Pyrenees To Autumn: Cauterets in the morning was blue skies and sunshine. The ‘Vignemale’ camp site was located amongst surrounding hills, which meant you waited until 9.30 for the rising sun to reach you but when it did, it was warm. Another lovely hot day but unfortunately, I was going home. As I said to the Brit neighbour sunning himself over breakfast outside his tent, “I bet it’s bloody raining”. It was. I thought I might miss the bus…
The Walking Instinct: They have no concern for facts, ideas, work. They’re concerned only with people. They don’t ask: “Is this true?” They ask: “Is this what others think is true?” Not to judge, but to repeat. Not to do, but to give the impression of doing. Not creation, but show. Not ability, but friendship. Not merit, but pull. What would happen to the world without those who do, think, work, produce? Those are the egoists. You don’t…
Valley Spirit Photography: It seems to me there are broadly two types of landscape. One is dramatic, elevating and impressive, and the other is ‘softer’ and comforting. In the Chinese Tao te Ching these are differentiated in terms of yin and yang, one nurturing and the other invigorating. The prospect of mountains expresses the latter and valleys and woodland typically represent the former. I gravitate towards mountains, both aesthetically and athletically; I find forest walking frustrating and claustrophobic…
Lighweight In The Hills: In the last five or ten years, there’s been a growing interest in cutting the weight we carry when we hike. Read a book about walking prior to this and it would advise big, heavy, traditional mountain boots. I duly bought a pair of Scarpas which lasted fifteen years before I either resoled them or replaced them. I walked in a lighter pair of boots I’d bought from Oxfam for £3 and found – after…
Glen Shiel And Skye In April: The plan focussed mostly on the Five Sisters of Kintail, camping and then finding other walks in the Glen Shiel valley. I arrived at night and set up my quick, light, minimalist Tarptent in the beam of my car headlights. The following morning was bright and sunny; I decided not to undertake a major walk but have an easy day after the long drive. It’s exciting exploring a new area and I felt that urge,…
East Of The Mountains by David Gutenberg: What is it, psychologically speaking, about a good read? I’ve just spent several days with a book which, if I had to summarise it in one word, would be “beautiful”. On the front cover of David Gutengerg’s East Of The Mountains, they quote The Times saying it was “ravishing”. Indeed it is; that describes it as well. Not in a sumptuous or colourful way, but in wonderfully simple language evoking all manner of themes, tensions…
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier: There’s a woman’s way of writing that drives me up the wall. It’s all about emotion, wrung out into tortuous narrative: I’ve not been, on the whole, well disposed to women writers. This dates back to A level study of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (I recall one of the quotations I used “poverty is no disgrace but ‘tis a great inconvenience” and the fact that very little happened), undergraduate study of Bronte’s…
The Pyrenees Mountains And Recurrent Places: There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand, Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly, I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be Thomas Hardy, Wessex heights My first mountain experience was at the age of about fifteen, consisting of a school trip to Wales. We went up Snowdon though I don’t recall that very well; did some forest orienteering and…
Pyrenees Mountains: The Pleasure of the Wash: I want to describe the pleasures of the wash. Not the comfort of a hot bath, fluffy mats, warm pyjamas and then perhaps bed, but something more bracing. Nor even the rush and tingle of a shower, to awaken and refresh you before work. This wash is different. It starts with a strip down to underpants, maintaining some modesty for who knows might see you? Carefully you step and slide into the water, feeling your way…
Pyrenees Mountain Walking Gear: Some years ago I bought a Berghaus Goretex jacket I subsequently found was not a good choice. It’s got a mesh lining and roll away collar which are somewhat awkward, and elasticated cuffs which don’t work very well. I reasoned I needed a lighter and sleeker design for summer, bought a North Face Paclite jacket in a January sale and found it suited me better in all but bad winter conditions when the extra length…
Mountain Walking: Physical, Emotional, Mental, Psychological: In a recent article, mountaineer Ed Douglas challenged one of the central notions of Robert McFarlane’s book Mountains of the Mind (The Great Outdoors/TGO magazine October 2010). He doesn’t believe, he says, it was only when the Romantics appeared that we learned to appreciate mountains. I know what he means. While it’s no doubt true, as McFarlane notes, Wordsworth and others reframed public perception of mountains and contributed to their popular appeal as places of…
Walking The Pyrenees: Summits Or A Long Distance Path: On two occasions recently in the Pyrenees, I got some extensive and useful advice from local Spanish walkers. The first time I’d walked up from Refuge Larri, above the Pineta Valley, on what I came to realise was a madcap plan. After I’d got a lift from cloud sodden Gavarnie to the sunnier Spanish parts, I wanted to return to the High Route which meant, if possible, going up to the Barroude Lake. There appeared…
Walking The Pyrenees 2010: Gavarnie When I arrived at the Lourdes station – weird and unpleasant though the town is – I felt I could breathe again. The Pyrenees can be seen in the distance, it’s a simple southern France town (underneath the tourist nonsense)) and it was warm. I felt the same thing two years ago though on that occasion as I made the journey to the mountains, the skies clouded over and remained that way for most of…
Street Conflict, Photography, The Imaginary, Symbolic, And Real: Returning home from work about four months ago a car pulled off the pavement where he was parked, into my path. I was forced into an emergency stop, and there was a minor collision. At the time, the scumbag apologised immediately. Two months later, he’d lied to insurance companies and was saying it was my fault. This would penalise me in terms of future insurance ratings. Instead of providing little sketches to illustrate what…
Mountain Walking: The Books Of Robert McFarlane: When I first heard of Robert McFarlane’s Mountains Of The Mind, I knew I wanted to read it. My special interest is the effect of mountains on mood and thought, the imperceptible but familiar process for regular walkers. We romp the hills for a few days and come back soothed, calmed, and refreshed; our psychological perspective changes coinciding with the altered geography. And as McFarlane notes, mountain walking involves a cultural and perceptual attitude that…
Mountains Of Scotland: First Impressions: The places in which any significant even occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in…
Mountain Walking: Wild Rhinog Pathways: I’ve just finished reading The Practice Of The Wild, by Gary Snyder. I found it very tedious and poor quality, largely just an emotional-narrative construct in which he blends ecology, Buddhism, native teachings and rural-anarchist politics. I ended up skipping much of it, weary of nonsensical platitudes such as “the world is watching: one cannot walk through a meadow or forest without a ripple of report spreading out from one’s passage” (19). There may be,…
Mountain Walking: Lake District Compared To Wales: It’s like returning sadly from holiday to face the daily grind, though with a difference: you start pining to be back there but in this case you can, and start planning accordingly. I’ve had three recent trips to Wales, the last of three days as opposed to two which makes a big difference. Two days and one night isn’t long enough to immerse yourself in the hills and forget the rest of life, when it…
Mountain Walking: Lost In Wales: Daniel Boone said he’d never been lost in all his life, but he’d once been confused for a few days. There are different kinds of getting lost. There’s the kind that is miserable, inconvenient or depressing, ruining the day or weekend trip. Staying at a Lake District B and B, I heard the tale of a group of girls who went down the wrong way (Piers Ghyll instead of the Corridor Route) and ended up…
Welsh Mountains: The First Skylark: I’m reading a novel at the moment, The Paperchase by Marcel Theroux, in which the protagonist is bequeathed a house by his uncle with the condition that he live in it and cannot sell it. The first few days he’s relaxingly adrift in the seaside isolation of the place, then he starts to develop routines and habits that give him a bearing. There’s something comforting about this, resting on its simultaneous inevitable and unnecessary character.…
Mountain Walking: the Welsh Arans: The first time I’d walked in this general area, it was Cadair Idris. I felt like a change, and moving on from Beddgelert where I’d been camping, and the otherwise long drive from Manchester was thus divided. I’d seen exciting pictures of Cadair Idris and these, and its name, had captured my imagination. It was a well known hill and I’d not done it: evoking not a peak bagging lust but desire for unknown pleasures…
Mountain Walking: Lake District Winter/Spring 2010: The lowest temperature I’ve experienced in the Lakes is minus 15 degrees. The first time, it started with an initial stroll around Castlerigg and some trepidation: this was cold. The following day’s temperature was no better, but the difference was I was walking Glaramara and my perambulation kept me passably warm. I couldn’t stop for more than five minutes without feeling alarmingly chilled. Technically, all of this meant a borderline situation in regard to survival…
Pyrenees Mountains: Psychological Perspective: One of the distinguishing features of mountain walking is the elevation it provides, and how psychological perspective changes with the geographic. Mind and feelings change as an inevitable consequence of environments; mountains are both aesthetically and psychologically refreshing. To understand this dynamic, its interesting if we look at remarks made by astronauts. I think this is even more pertinent than anything spoken or written by Everest mountaineers, because the experience of summiting the highest point on…
Photo Ruminations: Subtle Photography: One of the primary ingredients of landscape photography is the understanding and use of graphical control. This is similar to composition, but not entirely the same. The composition of a landscape scene has typical elements such as a lake, river or mountain, which attract the eye and evoke meaning. Psychologically, we are soothed by gentle horizontal planes and by water especially, and wide open spaces relax us further: we can see approaching danger which is…
Pyrenees Mountain Photography (3): Sorting through the hundreds of images from my walking in the Pyrenees has been an interesting editorial process. I’m only just completing it, about three months later. When I was walking and photographing I knew some shots were very successful, and this energised and excited me transcending the physical reality of being there. The walking was a formidable and joyous experience, and yet making a good photograph made me think of being at home and…
Pyrenees Dreams: Mountain Walking And Memory: I’ve always found the poetry of Wordsworth unappealing, too antique in both its language and outlook. He was though, almost what we might call a mountain poet. Much of his work revolved around the mountain experience, particularly as it’s experienced in the Lake District. There are two passages that summarise his poetic attitude, and illuminate the mountain walking experience and how it integrates into the rest of our lives. The first conveys an idea he…
Pyrenees Mountain Walking: Summer 2009: What follows is an account of my summer 2009 walking in the High Pyrenees. Its a fabulous mountain range extending from the Atlantic to the Mediterrenean, straddling the border between France and Spain. I flew from Manchester to Toulouse with a full eighteen days to enjoy. While I had been to the Pyrenees before, I had barely sampled what the mountains had to offer because of bad autumnal weather. This time it was different. My route…
Pyrenees Mountain Photography (2): One of the first things to be said about the Pyrenees is they are big: not the biggest in the world, smaller than the Alps, Andes and Himalayas, but about three times the size of British hills. This means the highest peaks, of mostly about 3000 feet in the UK, are in the Pyrenees over 3000 metres. If you were walking from valley to peak and back down again, common practise in the UK, this…
Pyrenees Mountain Photography: The Pyrenees are a wonderful mountain range extending from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, straddling the border of France and Spain. I’ve been there twice so far, the first time staying in a delightful town called Lescun though unfortunately at a grey, rainy, autumnal period with just one sunny day to enjoy and practise photography. This time, summer 2009, was very different. I started at Lescun again but walked across the mountains to Gavarnie, sleeping…
Wilderness Photography: Wildness was discovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Or rather rediscovered. It was the Romantics that did it. Of course, nature has always been celebrated in different ways across the centuries: you can see that from cave paintings, you can read it in the earliest poems that survive. But the Romantics were revolutionaries: and nature – wildness – was at the heart of their revolutionary fervour…for the romantics, wild nature – nature without…
Concerns Of Street Photography: Reading the Image: I got an enquiry recently from a GCSE student, who was researching a photographer. She wanted to ask about my equipment, technique, intentions and inspiration for street photography; she was taking shots, as she called it, of people “hanging out” on the streets of Belfast. I’m not teaching her, and don’t know exactly what her brief was or its GCSE context, so my answer was more general and simplified than it would be to a…
Improving Mountain Photography (3): In my two previous articles I described a typical day walking in the mountains and how to pursue mountain photography, and provided a detailed account of photographing a specific location. I will continue now with some general aesthetic points about mountain photography, and how to improve it. An American photographer called George Barr suggests there are seven levels to consider when we judge a photograph. The schema he offers refers to what are I suspect recognisable…
Better Mountain Photography (2): In my last article I described a typical photographic day in the Lake District, what to expect and how to deal with unpredictable if not poor weather in a typical British summer. This time I’ll describe the small series of shots I got in one small area, and how I evaluated them. When I arrived unexpectedly at this small waterfall location I noticed immediately that it had photographic potential, and as the sun was shining…
Better Mountain Photography (1): There are many aspects to mountain photography and it is ultimately, like art, a matter of instinct and on that basis cannot really be taught. It has certain features though that can be discussed, that helps to refine if not awaken that instinct. The following encounter in the Lake District describes a typical walking day while carrying a camera, and documents its important features and subsequent photographic editing. I’d arrived the day before in…