First, a bit more about me, just for background. I live and work in the UK, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. I have been interested in photography for a long time as a hobby, but recently opened a Photographic Studio in Bury to exhibit and sell my own work and that of other local photographers (www.guildhallstudio.com). This has now become the main focus of my photographic work which is both exciting and challenging. There’s nothing like a member of the public telling you in no uncertain terms exactly why they like or dislike your work to focus your mind and make you think hard about what you’re doing. (I’ll talk more about the studio in a later post, as I want to make sure that the work I do on the MA course feeds into the life of the studio and vice-versa).

This is the first time that I have undertaken a more serious, academic approach to photography. My main interests in photography have always been landscape (and particularly the coastline), travel and the natural world and it’s been interesting to reflect on where I think I am on the window/mirror spectrum and the relative influence this has on the images I take and how I take them. My initial reaction was to side with the window metaphor, but in a positive and not negative way. I do not agree with the proposition of a window/frame/lens being a limiting and coercive force (I disagree with Susan Sontag’s view of photography as “appropriating the thing photographed”), I see it rather as a window opening onto a new place, creating new opportunity, pushing out the boundaries of the horizon – essentially the photographer inviting the viewer on a journey into a world perhaps not previously experienced. For me it’s an open window, not a closed one.

But having initially rejected the idea of my work being an internal mirror, and being more concerned about looking outwards, I reconsidered what the mirror metaphor meant. It seems to me that every piece of work must necessarily be a reflection to some extent or another of the person creating the work. What has brought me to this spot on this loch in Scotland to take this image of the scene in front of me? What has brought me to be walking down this path through this woodland in Suffolk at this moment in time, and seeing an image which I think is worth recording? I would probably say it’s impossible to dissociate the image from the image-maker completely, but that there’s a huge range in how much of yourself you choose to reflect into the image or not. There’s a whole debate to be had on what influences you can choose to bring to the image (location, method, acquired knowledge, preferences) and those you consciously or subconsciously bring to the image almost unavoidably like metadata (culture, background, life experiences,…).

I really love the concept of Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections – the whole self thrown into the images and the story, though I wonder how “cheated” many people may have felt to discover that the “self” was itself a creation¹.

I came across a different metaphor recently as well which I also like. Jeff Wall (Canadian artist) “divides photographers into Hunters and Farmers, the former tracking down and capturing images, the latter cultivating them over time”². Most of my photography falls into the Hunter category, but I do also enjoy creating more abstract images, though still based on the natural world around me.

Notes

1      Ulman A. Excellences and Perfections, 2015

2      Cotton C. The photograph as contemporary art. UK: Thames and Hudson, 2009