My Influences - Robert Adams

Robert Adams

The work of any photographer will always carry the influence of others. Anyone with a deep love of the topic will seek out excellence and draw on examples from of those who have gone before. This is not in order to copy them but to learn from their experience and views and develop their own thoughts about what you wish to achieve. I consider photography as an embodiment of philosophy and thoughtfulness which brings a focus to work.

As my interest grew over the years I found ways to acquire knowledge through books, exhibitions and meeting others. However the internet changed everything in terms of accessibility to knowledge and when I retired I started to read, look and listen more attentively. Other pages of this blog will eventually reveal other influences but for this one I wish to highlight the American photogrpaher of the mid-West Robert Adam.

Adam has both worked as a photographer and taught and written extensively. Now in his eighties he is still working.

Among his books Beauty in Photography, originally published in 1981 and re-published with a new preface in 1996 by Aperture, was significant for me. In it, talking about landscapes, Adams describes his three verities or truths for considering a photograph. He says that they should contain geography (whether that is a room, a landscape or a box is not important), autobiography (something of the photographer themselves) and metaphor - a symbolism that adds meaning. I cannot now take a picture without considering this and it influences what I look for and see in the work of others too.

You can find out more about Adams here :- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Adams_(photographer)

as well as watch a short interview accompanied by some of his photographs here :-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuhxlLv_f2k 

Book Review - Futuro Retro - Photographs by Maria Svarbova

Futuro Retro - a collection of photographs by  Maria Svarbova

Published by New Heroes and Pioneers  - 2019

RRP £50.00 (255pp)

For some time Maria Svarbova has been a photographer whose work have admired since I discovered her Swimming Pool and Girl Power series in 2018. This comprehensive book covers the last six years or so of her work. It is hard to believe that she has won many awards, including being named a Hasselblad Master, and shown worldwide (including in Vogue magazine) given that she only became a photographer in 2010 and has never received formal training. In fairness this last fact may have helped her. 

She is now 32 years old.

Maria is Slovakian and lives in Bratislava. She studied archeology at University but was given a camera in her third year there by her sister and found her true profession.

Her work has an eerie and other worldly quality to it, hauntingly beautiful in its carefully chosen pastel shades but questioningly brutal in its emotionless examinations. Sometimes it harks back to a far more frugal time in Slovakia's history, to a time when communism made life more challenging and emotions less visible.

 Maria works with a team of friends from art school bringing their knowledge of set design, styling and fashion into her world. Although she has been keen to cut her own path as a photographer in order to create an original style (which she has certainly achieved) the influences of her favourite artists such as David Hockney and Edward Hopper are more difficult for her to avoid. This is not a detriment.

The book is well printed and the photographs mainly full page (about 9" x 12"). Descriptions of her working methods and the background to her works are described too by the editors Francois Le Bled and Matt Porter. You can find out much more about her work on the web and through her very comprehensive website.

https://www.mariasvarbova.com/about 

Sunk Island road

I do live in a wonderful and fairly empty part of the UK. Apart from the City of Hull,  the East Riding of Yorkshire consists mainly of small towns and villages which lie between the North Sea, the mighty River Humber and the North Yorkshire moors. 

The Wolds, which once you escape the watery edges, are folded hills and valleys of chalkland created by glaciers in the last ice age. You can walk in them for hours and barely see anyone, much less a dwelling. 

The flat edges of the County hold a different beauty (and a threat from rising water levels) in their endless roads and fields, snooker-table flat and with huge skies . This road is in Sunk Island, a part of Holderness. It is much photographed and this picture is a stitch of three photographs with a large 400 mm lense to flatten the perspectives. The road does not, of course, end with a tree in the middle but swings left just as you approach it. Nonetheless it does make for a startling vision. In summer, of course, the view is very different as the leaf covering reaches across the road surface and throws light and shadow in different directions.

Flora

I have never quite understood why photographers sometimes seem to bemoan wet weather. Apart from great reflections outdoors and multiple opportunities to show the world in a different light (literally) it gives us an opportunity to turn our attention to indoor shooting, whether in a studio or at home. 

At these times I find flowers incredibly useful and have even taken enough shots to get a whole exhibition out of them.

However just taking a shot of a single flower or a bunch of them is a challenge if you want to make people look twice. Floral pictures are two a penny.  My aim is often to either shoot detail, light them differently or find an unusual way to display them.

In the case of the carnations above I was in the studio and it was wet. I'd bought the flowers on my way in determined to do something. I had a strong steady studio light and a round but shallow glass bowl. I filled the bowl with water and cut the heads off the flowers so they floated but crammed the space then placed the bowl on top of the light, correcting the strength of the light as I went along. The camera was on a boom directly over the bowl.

I was more than happy with the results and one of the sequence (not shown here) eventually won me a prize in an exhibition - so result from wet weather and a bit of thought and experimentation. 

So remember, if you want to get your work seen, think differently...

Multis

Cameras are exciting bits of kit these days. Exploring them fully takes time but one of the features I discovered which I am enjoying experimenting with is the in camera facility to merge photos. This picture (of Humber Street in Hull) is a montage of three photographs, taken within a few seconds from different angles and then merged in camera.

The facility can be used in different ways. You can take a much larger number of pictures over a longer period of time from a fixed position with the camera on a tripod. This tends to show people and other moving objects like cars and buses as a part of time. Ghostly. Passing through and impermanent. Equally it can be fixed on a single point with an object moving away to show movement. Or shots can be taken of a person in different positions, again from a tripod , to signal mood or overlap.

I am still experimenting with this and have no idea what might happen with it. No doubt however it will improve from where I am at present....

The Gran Sasso

Travel broadens the mind they say and it certainly did when I went to the Abruzzo region of Italy nearly two years ago now with three other photographers. Not only was it beautiful and almost empty of tourists but the variety of scenery from the Trabbochi coast into the national parks which ran up into the Appenines was stunning and historic. The days drive included several stops in wonderful hilltop towns, some having suffered from earthquakes in the recent past. The roads looped the loop and got higher and higher with accordingly bigger drops to the valleys below.

This shot was taken in the Gran Sasso D'Italia national park and the rock running up on the left leads to the ruins of a castle once the highest fortified building in Europe. In the distance is the Great Horn, the second highest mountain in Italy and standing where we were we only just failed to top Ben Nevis. 

On the day we arrived autumn storms swept through the valleys and we could see the rain pouring down and racing along as the sun followed and shone brilliantly where a downpour had been minutes earlier. Luckily the cloud stayed below us.

The chapel was a much later addition than the castle and we set up our tripods and cameras and watched nervously as the clouds came and went and the sun edged around the rock. We knew that it should hit the doorway of the chapel soon but whether the timing would be right was another thing. Eventually it arrived at just the right moment and, thankfully, we clicked away until it diappeared again. It had been a great day, the clouds and light played along with our needs (just) and we rushed back to the car as the large raindrops started to fall. We shouldn't have worried. The wind gusted it away very quickly.

Harvesting

Some time ago I was chatting with artist Peter Watson, whose work I had admired for some time. As both a painter and graphic designer his work has an architectural quality that appeals to me (http://peterwatsonpaintings.co.uk/) . 

We agreed to work towards a joint exhibition that featured harvesting, an activity close to the hearts of many an East Yorkshire resident as farming provides one of the key industries in the area. Peter's paintings will be in colour but my photographs will be mono. A great contrast we hope!

We have yet to complete that work but I am looking forward to getting out again over the next couple of months and isolating myself at the edge of fields to add to the many pictures I have taken over the last two summers. 

Sometimes I ask for help too. On this occasion if you hear of anyone planning to harvest at dusk with their tractor lights on I'd love to know. I haven't got any shots like that at all as yet...

A bridge, a UFO and welcome

Hello and welcome to my blog site. This site has been created to both introduce you to my work as a photographer and to keep you up-to-date with my history, thinking and developing themes.

As I mostly work in photographic sequences you may see me return to old themes previously mentioned to update them or introduce new ones. But the stories of my pictures, the inspiration for them and the actual process of taking them will be a part of the journey.

I hope you enjoy the ride....and in case you wondered the photograph above is of the UFO Observation Tower which forms part of the Novy Bridge (naturally also known as the UFO Bridge) linking the old town and Hrad Castle to a newer part of the city. It gives spectacular views of the Danube as well as providing a lookout over the Old Town.