Red Pike Saturday October 15, 2005
This depicts a section of a walk I did up to a mountain called Pillar, in the Lake District, in July 2005. The first half of the route was a little depressing, because as you can see it was cloudy and grey. Just further up the ridge you had views over to other parts of the Lakes that were beautifully clear and sunny. It’s the perennial problem with this area, Wasdale and Eskdale, that situated next to the Irish Sea they suffer from maritime gloom. But I love this photo and for me it redeemed the first part of the walk because it meant I got something worthwhile from it. It also raises interesting aesthetic questions.
Many years ago I was stunned with the first pictures I saw of the Lakes, and further stunned with my subsequent visits. But with familiarity comes – not contempt, but an absence of any thrill. The fact is if you wander around the Lake District tourist shops, you begin to realise the postcards and books cover a fairly predictable library of images. Sometimes the best ones, taken from the best viewpoints, but there’s only so many photos of, for example, Ashness Bridge above Derwentwater that you want to see. It’s a wonderful composition of packhorse bridge in the foreground, followed by layers of grassy fells and trees, culminating in the shapely curves of Skiddaw and Blencathra mountains. I loved it when I first saw it in a battered little book I’d bought for 20 pence, but I’ve probably seen it a hundred times since then and it no longer appeals. It’s true that the colours, light and conditions dramatically transform the landscape, but even then you become familiar with the beautiful autumnal russets, the fresh spring-time greenery and even – which surprised me when I discovered this – the lovely dustings of icing-sugar snow or the lavish white carpeting that doesn’t occur very often, but makes the Lakes like the Alps. You still enjoy the scenes but they don’t excite: especially when taken from the famous and well-known viewpoints.
Which brings me back to my own photo. If I didn’t explain that this is the ridge going up to Red Pike and then Pillar, it’s unlikely anyone would recognise where it is. It’s not a souvenir photo, such that you see in tourist emporiums. It could easily be in Wales, Scotland, or anywhere else. But it’s interest lies in the way it captures a quintessential mountain experience– dramatic, or adverse conditions – and in that respect in shows the essence of mountain walking, rather than the formulaic vistas. Because it’s anonymous it can be anything and anywhere, but recognisable as a typical and interesting moment.
I don’t think either type of photo is superior to the other, generic shots or identifiable souvenir shots. But they are different, and interestingly, it’s the souvenir type of photo that you normally see. And the latter normally have clear conditions and pristine blue skies, whereas in my shot here the swirling cloud billowing in from the right is much of the interest. On over-pretty sky would have created a bland photograph, and the power of this composition derives from its graphic simplicity, the contrast between the foreground rocks and the soft cloud, the illuminated grass and the distant shadowy ridge, the full length of which can just be discerned. Beyond that ridge, looking over to the northern part of the Lakes and to Scotland, it was bright and sunny.