Struth and the Snow Queen
Posted on November 19, 2007
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The Snow Queen in Sheringham this afternoon was good; there was cheering and booing, much sing-a-long and all the children had a good time. We had ice creams in the interval, had to participate in all the actions(I’m fine with that thank you) and my youngest daughter got up on stage as a bird….she did well. But all the time I was thinking of Thomas Struth’s pictures taken in museums where the colours of the viewers are simpathetic to the colours in the paintings therefore the lines become blurred between viewer and viewed. I love many aspects of Struth’s work, but it’s this purely visual delight that gets me every time. …anyway….here is the Sheringham Little Theatre… with deep respect to Thomas.
The familiar
Posted on November 13, 2007
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Much as I would like to lay claim to walking great distances with the big camera and tripod over my shoulder….it ain’t so. Itss heavy and awkward and one of its qualities is to make you want to look at what is closer to home…what is more familiar. Would I have taken this picture if I had not been thinking about how the 10×8 inch negative could render the detail of all these leaves and branches?
I heard yesterday of a baker in my local town of Fakenham who can’t smell the bread he bakes. He can however smell the bread from the bakery opposite when the wind wafts it gently across the street and through his open door.
Festival of Photography and Landscape
Posted on November 8, 2007
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So, dates are set for the 15th and 16th May 2008 in and around Burnham Market in North Norfolk. The aim is to have what could loosely be called ‘conference’ or ‘festival’ even, on the themes of landscape and photography. It may be just me and my mate Dave in the pub for a couple of days, continuing the many discussions we have had over the last few years….but I fancy it might become a little bit more than that. We aim to collar a speaker or two, have some debates and discussions and generally share and glean as much information as we can over 2 or 3 days in the Norfolk spring sunshine.
There are hotels here, and campsites, many B and Bs and some of the finest village halls you can imagine… we can begin to put some of that information online through the winter.
There is no certain agenda yet beyond sharing a love of photography and its capabilities to inspire and promote the deep and fundamental contact we have with the landscape around us. The aim is to push the boundaries out rather than hem it all in….there are many appoaches out there.
I welcome the thoughts that you might have… so please register, add your comments and ideas through the weblog pages here and tell anyone who might be interested..
Thanks
Harry
Looking for a place in the woods
Posted on November 5, 2007
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Two pictures here from a couple of days ago when my sculptor friend Nick and I were in the woods looking for a place to do a bronze casting for a new show catalogue. It is full blown autumn, quite warm and surprisingly dry underfoot and what we are looking for is a flat area that might accomodate the bits a bobs needed; gas canisters, crucible, furnace etc. Looking back at all the pictures though…and if you can ignore the hat…its astonishing how all the pictures look the same. The details of course can be compared; the fence and the fallen branches but the glow of light and the nature of the place is so strong that the individual compositions barely take on any significance at all. I took plenty of these digital pictures, under the oaks and beeches and I swear to you they all make the same noise. It makes sense perhaps; this is what its like in November….late afternoon…in the woods.
Must have been the right place…but the wrong time.
Posted on June 14, 2007
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Ever had this as a photographer? Right place wrong time is an expression that can imply some bad luck with the weather, running out of film perhaps or even just seeing something without the camera to record it. Recently though I have been aware of another situation where the sense of ‘missing it’ and it might be better described as ‘right time wrong place’.
3 days ago I was out in the late morning for a recce around some woodland surrounding one of the barrows that look over the landscape near Stonehenge. The camera and tripod were in the van and I wasn’t really expecting to take a picture, but around the corner the light was catching the view in front of me with that sensitivity that renders many things as one; a full scene with the chalk path running beneath beech trees and out to the distance, a hedgerow full of blossom and greenery. Grasses, vetch and buttercups. More than that I can’t tell you about the detail, but it all had a great feeling of completeness…of totality. Right place…right time. I went to the van and was back before long and set it all up within I suppose 10 minutes. The conditions were much the same by the time I was ready to take the picture, but this is a situation that I am often faced with; does this scene do all the things I think it should? It’s question that is born out of cost I’m afraid…a sheet of film being all but £35 to buy process and contact. Was this scene the same? Well the answer was no… but boy was it close. Of course the physicality was all there, the trees and the path. Compositionally it was just fine but the essence of it all had gone; not the light itself, but the unity that that light can provide had gone. What is interesting and always so surprising as a photographer is how strong is the desire to make the picture anyway, that perhaps the camera and the subsequent processes of develope and print can somehow bring it all back.
Anyway, as I waited for the cloud to move and the sun to rise to reveal a new magic I soon got excited about the wood itself and the prospect of within. The light had moved on….wrong time, wrong place.
More on the abundance of things
Posted on June 14, 2007
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Its been a strange spring. Such warmth through April and then the wetness of May and the two combined in June has turned everything here in Norfolk on its head and sent nature on a mad gallop. The bird song seems louder than ever and the race to procreate (the birds that is) is more urgent than normal. Just walking back from the bus stop this morning a sparrow appeared on a gatepost in front of me, dropped a tiny, lifeless chick on the pavement, chirruped and sped back in to the hedge to continue with the important stuff. Better get on. We have a barn owl around us at night and two young ones sit in the tree outside our window and make beckoning greedy sounds that only owls can…a sort relentless rythmic screech that I worry must burrow into the childrens dreams.
I know that every year we are surprised by the pace and vigour of a spring, but this year it does seem to have drawn itself on…starting early, and stretching into the the domain of what I would normally consider summer.
Here is a picture across the duck pond opposite where I live. It’s an ash tree and I guess its doing the fauna equivalent of the those birds. Overwhelming spread of green. For your interest…here is one of the same place in the winter….now that seems a long way off.
More on the volume
Posted on May 12, 2007
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Burnham Norton. Norfolk. May 12th. With reference to the last post…there are times, such as yesterday, when the air over the saltmarsh has an outstanding sense of volume. Generally it needs the kind of cumulus shown here, medium height and spread across the sky… out to the distance. However that’s what just kicks off the notion and though you can’t see it on this little picture, you soon become aware of the birdlife within this space; the criss cross of gulls, lapwings and oyster catchers, small finches in the sueda bushes and the swifts and martins catching flies higher up. It’s all on the move with a light wind that’s feathering the grasses on the bank. Big place.
May Blossom. Inside out.
Posted on May 10, 2007
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May 10th. So much of what I have been looking at over the last year has been the space between things; the invisible but perceptible volume that lies between objects… either significant or not. It’s perhaps the opening in the woods, the cleared way of a path or even the vast breadth of a valley carved through the ice age. Interiors, a gap in the hedge or the slight dip of land on a hillside. But sometimes it’s about the way that things fill that space….an outward process that disrupts the surroundings. And at this time of year the hawthorn bushes here break out of some kind of winter deconstruction and dominate the space around them. They are wholly… themselves.
Even in a wider view…its hard to take your eyes of it. r0012865.jpg
You might like to see an evening look at hawthorn here
In the Garden
Posted on May 1, 2007
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May 1st 7.30pm. Cooler now and there is still this north easterly breeze that has kept the temperature down all day. The sky is still blue but with a touch of redness as the suns quite low now; catching the tops of the chimney on our house, the oaks on the other side of the village and the poplars above us that are waving slightly in the wind. There seem like many blackbirds around…all calling in the hedgerows. There are robins too and the sound of the someone using a strimmer somewhere in the village. The air is cool and dry and scented with the lilac tree just in front of me and I see that the oak and chestnuts at the top of the hill are almost fully out.
I must move that old oven, cut the apple this autumn, move that pig wire soon. The door into the workshop still isn’t painted.
Nope. Not now. This is ten minutes of sitting. May the 1st and so it begins now and it’s good to be blogging again. I mean to continue as I have started. You will see.