Photo Ruminations: Subtle Photography · Monday January 25, 2010
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 not the case with urban streets and their alleys, buildings, doorways, and parked cars. There are reasons why we enjoy landscape, which a magazine editor once told me is the most popular kind of amateur photography.
Graphical editing of a mountain scene is a fundamental and necessary part of successful photography; one of the pleasures of mountain walking is the photographic abundance you find there and how to organise it effectively in the viewfinder. I’ve spent more days than I care to remember roaming mean streets and local parks, woods, and fields, finding very little of interest. One of the photographic platitudes of common folklore is how you can make a photograph from the aesthetics of any location. It’s a laudable principle, but nonsense when compared to the opportunities of travelling to inherently attractive places. There is however one kind of landscape photography especially suitable for this kind of thinking: one of my favourite photography volumes uses this aesthetic, and was a serendipitous find in a second hand bookshop. The book’s called Walking, and features the work of John Wawrzonek (www.lightsongfineart.com). There’s a lovely, subtle quality to his images that’s quite difficult to achieve. His subject is seemingly banal – leaves on the ground, grasses, backwater rivers – but the beauty is undeniable if you have a feeling for such things.
It’s very different to my style of photography, and therefore challenging to consider. I’m used to the sweep of valleys, the height of the hills, and the scale and drama of mountains crafted to good compositional effect. My eye is trained to scan line, curve, perspective, proportion, depth, and immensity. The eye of Wawrzonek notices closer and more intimate details with a different kind of charm. There’s an ‘emptiness’ to his images where the eye isn’t led into distance and around big views with the implication of scale and thus hard work but rather, comes to rest on the picture all at once and enjoy it accordingly. I find this rather soothing.
I occasionally attempt this kind of photography myself, though once again success does depend on where you are. Wawrzonek explores near urban terrain but he does this in New England, where he lives. At the very least, what you can say about his photography is it has a characteristic New England style: the trees, foliage, bushes and grasses may not be wholly unique to the area but they certainly can’t be found everywhere, and not in Britain. It’s quite depressing when you’re inspired by the work of others and find you simply cannot do anything similar, because the environments in which you live are different. The many days I’ve driven and wandered around my general location were largely fruitless. It’s not that I can’t recognise the potential; it’s a simple fact that Manchester based England is rather dreary.
I’ve made a few pictures though, based on this notion of subtle, simple photography: not the drama of mountain or the impact of wilderness but small details worth noticing, consistent with Thoreau’s observation that
We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts (Walden).
This one was directly inspired by the work of Wawrzonek:
I don’t think it compares to his work though it’s quite pleasing; but then again he doesn’t rely on wandering around a scrub area near to Chorlton Water Park in Manchester. The trees below were taken at the same place. Potentially, a simple shot like this can be extraordinarily beautiful with the right light; light, or rather its absence when thick grey skies are more common, is another feature of Northern England:
One place I have returned to multiple times, with reasonable success, is an area at the edge of Cheshire’s Lyme Park where it borders the Peak District. I can drive there in about thirty minutes. There’s a particular tree where I must have spent several hours surveying it photographically in different seasons; snow has been best, but even then it lacks a certain drama:
More interesting perhaps, and consistent with the more subtle intimate approach, are the lovely colours of the small ravine below the tree called Cluse Hey, and some shots I took while spending about an hour at the bottom of it in what was, for once, rarely, some good light:
Finally, I regard the following shot as similarly accomplished. Note how simple and ostensibly banal the subject is, just a beaten down track across a field. The point is, aesthetically speaking, how beautiful are the subtle colours, light and textures. I spent about thirty minutes here quickly summing up the view for its optimum composition, while the light disappeared rapidly. Thirty minutes later, the scene was uniformly dull:
The reality is, this field is next to a Cheshire road near to Dunham Park. Nothing too exciting or idyllic. The point is, it suggests something very different: a world where natural scenes like this exist, with graceful paths to explore. The biography is, I’ve driven around this area many times constantly gazing at the fields for photographic possibility. They’re very pleasing to the eye – but not the camera. Taken together, trying to “carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look” using meagre environmental resources, this is probably my best accomplishment. The fact is however, some environments are far more conducive to photography than others; I recommend the advice of Thoreau and the example of Wawrzonek, but recognise the limits of this photographic approach and where failure lies: quite likely not in you, but in where you live.