Is this photo any good?

Apparently it is. It seems to have been selected for the exalted status of “Explore” on Flickr, which is something I’ve never given much attention to. However, this raises it’s visibility, and therefore it gets many more visits, more comments, more favourites than ninety percent of the photos I post.

I posted it as part of by sort-of 1 photo a day Antarctic Archive project. To me it is at best a curiosity, and it completely falls apart at anything larger than the size I posted it at. It was taken centuries ago, with a Canon FT-QL camera, I think a 50mm f1.4 lens, and one of these screw-in fisheye lenses that were big when flares were in fashion the first time around. I guess the first, and probably last, reaction of anybody now is that it came straight out of Instagram. Or a Holga. But there’s no post-processing at all beyond cleaning up the scan. The file wouldn’t even take sharpening. It is totally soft, the composition isn’t even considered. Any serious landscape photographer would be embarassed to be asked to venture an opinion on it.

It has an atmosphere to it, and an eerie sort of feel. It seems to touch a nerve. It’s hardly a typical Antarctic landscape shot. At best, it’s a collection of mistakes which somehow summed up turn into something interesting.

But is it a good photo? I guess I’m not qualified to be the judge of that.

With my forthcoming cruise around the Antarctic Peninsula as the excuse, a few days ago I started posting some scans of slides dragged from the ancient past, when I spent two summer field seasons in Antarctica on British and Norwegian science programmes.

I’ve got something like 1500 slides from those trips, a mix of Kodachrome 25, Kodachrome 64, and Ektachrome (100, I think). About 250 I had selected around 15 years ago, and stored in archival boxes. The rest, some of which I’ve barely glanced at, are in the “rejects” folder. Many are in poor condition, having suffered fungus attacks. A large proportion are badly exposed, badly composed, heavily vignetted, or out of focus. Usually all of these. But some are interesting - to me at least, from a number of points of view. They show how I took photographs when I had no real idea of what phtography was about. Sometimes they are of some merit, but mostly they show that I was trying to tell stories to people back home, to capture atmospheres, moods and colours. There’s no real sense that I had any concept of “landscape photography” as an aim in itself.

some freshly minted scans

From a technical point of view, I’m benefitting from a lot more experience in scanning. I have had attempts at scanning selections in the past, in particular about 6 years ago, when I published a small book, but now I have a fully colour managed Kodachrome calibrated, Silverast HDR workflow, and I can use Silverfast 8 HDR. I started scanning on my Canoscan 9000F flatbed, but eventually switched to the Minolta film scanner. Even though the benefit with some of these slides is minimal, and I lose the 64bit HDRi option, the ability to auto focus, set the focus point, or fully manual focus on the Minolta is a significant benefit for extracting the finest detail.

Initially I was hoping to create a Blurb book, just for me, to take along on the trip, but the amount of work required just to do the initial 48bit HDR scans is huge. It seems I’ve been feeding the scanners since summer, and I’m not even half way through. So at best it will be an iPad portfolio, and starting a few days back, a daily post on Flickr. Maybe life is easier with digital…

I received some very nice feedback from Bruce Percy about the post I wrote about his latest book, Iceland, A Journal of Nocturnes. He was particularly taken by my observation that it seemed that Iceland was the stage, not the scene, for his photography.

What I meant by that is that the photographs in his book, in particular those of the black sand beach, work at several levels, and the dominant one, for me, is not the purely pictorial. By concentrating on a very limited, but infinitely variable, subject matter, and imposing further constraints such as low, winter light and film as a recording medium, he removes distractions and sets the stage for a very personal narrative. He communicates using shape, form and especially a very personal colour palette, rather than words, but a strong message emerges, conveying a degree of serenity but at the same time inner conflict, uncertainty and doubt. The positive wins over, but there is a strong tension there, and while the photography is undeniably beautiful, it isn’t blandly pretty.

And all this led me on to another train of thought altogether, which is going to twist this article into a rather more introspective thread. It occurred to me on reading Bruce’s feedback that perhaps my “review” itself was working on more than one level. Superficially, it’s talking about Bruce’s book, but at the same time it’s revealing something about the way I tend to conceal myself with misdirection and obscure, convoluted references. Maybe I’m actually obliquely referring to my own approach to photography, which is far less defined, or indeed accomplished, than Bruce’s, but when I think about it, reveals more than I imagined.

This started out with the observation that Bruce’s landscape photography very rarely includes any kind of human element - there’s not much crossover with his equally excellent travel portraiture portfolio. One exception is his work some years back on Torness nuclear power station, which actually first brought him to my attention. In my case, maybe the photography that I have an emotional investment in is precisely what I call the “human landscape”. Of the several sets of photos from Iceland I’ve published here, the one which feels most personal is exactly the one entitled “Iceland - the Human Landscape”.

These human landscape photos of mine are static. There are no people in them, just traces of where people have been. They usually record abandonment in some form or another, or isolation, or both, and the direction is firmly towards the past. I guess a psychoanalyst would have a field day with that - and rightly so. My other landscapes are perhaps sometimes reasonably accomplished, but I think they’re fairly sterile, like a great deal of landscape photography. I’m very fond of the long exposure rocks and water stuff, although in my defence I could plead that there’s an abundance of that sort of subject pretty much on my doorstep, so it would be perverse to avoid it. I do try to avoid the overblown Velvia look, and not to go overboard with the autumn leaves strewn over mossy rock stuff (although sometimes temptation is hard to resist).

There is more to this than just photography. Many years ago, during my two sojourns in Antarctica, although the nature and landscape was overwhelming, what really captivated me where the traces of the attempts of people to colonise, if only briefly, this utterly inhospitable landscape. Places like Deception Island, Port Lockroy, and much further South, Druzhnaya 2 (probably now completely vanished). It was the same in Svalbard, where I found myself as much if not more fascinated by places like Pyramiden, or the much less accessible Grumant (therefore more appealing), than glaciers and polar bears.

Back to the present, and much closer to home, I’ve recently spent a lot of borrowed time on a couple of projects exploring the woods near where I work. I’ve already published one of these here (The Pipe). The next, probably called “The Beaten Track”, is in progress, and required quite a lot more scrambling around, some of it verging on perilous. Both of these, especially the latter, once again centre around decaying signs of past human activity.

Strange device half buried in snow, Druzhnaya 2, Ronne Ice Shelf, Antarctica 1988

The “Texas Bar”, Liefdefjorden, Svalbard, 2010

Vanishing point, Camorino, Switzerland, 2012

The more I think about it, the more the subconscious drivers become clear. By building up an imaginary narrative around ambiguous signs of the past, I’m trying to build a past for myself, something that I can take root it. Due to a somewhat nomadic childhood, growing up in a confused state between several cultural frameworks, I don’t really have anyplace I can really call “home”. Whenever people ask me “so where in England are you from ?”, I have no answer. I’m not really from anywhere, and this has always led me to feel unsettled and to some extent insecure. So, it seems that this desire to belong is somehow expressing itself through my photography. Not necessarily my best photography in any aesthetic sense, but my best in the sense that it actually means something. So perhaps that’s why I’m so into photography - it gives me a stage to create an imaginary past on.

Well, why not ?

The Bee Gees must have been prescient when they wrote “cause we’re living in a world of fools”, because they we didn’t have internet photo nerd forums back in the 70s (we had flares - much better). If there is one thing guaranteed to wind me up most in those wastelands of joined-up thinking it is when some dweeb starts whining, posturing or proclaiming that such and such camera and/or lens doesn’t have “enough DOF”. DOF, of course, meaning Depth Of Field, but all the evidence tends to indicate that 90% of the aforementioned dweebs don’t know that. Back in the 70s (well, ok, 90s as far as I’m concerned), “enough DOF” meant being able to get a significant amount of your scene in focus. And it wasn’t easy, with 100 ISO (film, that is) being considered fast!

DOF porn Exhibit 1. Almost certainly (a) the first intentional picture of DOF I ever took, and (b) the least interesting and most pointless photo ever made in Antarctica. Canon FTb, 50mm f/1.8

In dweeb-land, however, “DOF” means getting as much of your photo out of focus as possible, preferably rendering everything in a pretty swirly smoothy hazy way so as to make the subject - usually a brick wall, or their back garden - totally unrecognisable. And it gets much, much worse when you run up against a Full Frame Cultist, who will inform you, in no uncertain terms, and with no room for discussion, that His (they’re always male) Way is The One Truth. You absolutely cannot get enough “DOF” (or indeed resolution, sensitivity, you name it), with, horror of horrors, a (micro) four-thirds sensor. Well, I beg to differ.

DOF porn Exhibit 2. Only a camera geek could love it. Panasonic Lumix 25mm f/1.4

And oh do I wish I find out where to get all that extraneous DOF four-thirds sensors apparently suffer from. Then I’d be able to get the jumbled bunches of rocks I like to photograph all in focus!

All systems, pretty much, allow you to be creative with shallow depth of field. It’s all down to focal length and positioning. Sure, there are certain configurations that are easier, or perhaps only possible, with a given lens on a full frame sensor. But exactly the same can be said for other combinations. Within reason, and excluding extreme edge cases, you can pretty much achieve whatever effect you want with any camera system. It just requires less talk, and more thought.

Of course, in 95% of cases normal people neither like nor see the point of these photos. They’re not photos of anything, just “tests” to show what “great DOF” Lens X can do. Fantastic. There are a few exceptions, but actually using this effect in a truly creative and rewarding way is very, very hard.

Extreme lenses, such as the Leica Noctilux f0.95, were designed for low-light shooting, not “DOF”. I can’t imagine trying to actually focus a Noctilux on a rangefinder! These days, with digital cameras giving good performance at ISO levels beyond film’s wildest dreams, these ultra-fast lenses are even more niche items. Typically, in the Film Age, lenses designed for soft-focus backgrounds were short teles with maximum apertures in the f/2 to f/2.8 range. Which, strangely enough, in terms of “equivalent separation”, is exactly where the Panasonic Summilux f/1.4, which I just bought in a fit of futile retail therapy, sits. And don’t let any forum troll tell you different.

I didn’t think I really needed any more Iceland photography books. I’ve got quite a lot, in all shapes and sizes. Some are excellent, some so-so, a couple are outstanding and one or two are crap. But altogether they add up to a lot. Or indeed too many.

Rather too much of a good thing?

So, when I first heard that Bruce Percy’s second book was to be about Iceland, I was perhaps a little underwhelmed. But eventually, for various reasons, I decided to order it, and it arrived a few days ago. Now, this is absolutely not a review. Bruce has stated that he doesn’t like reading reviews, and I’m not much good at writing them. But this book, “Iceland - a Journal of Nocturnes” makes me want to write about it. It’s a bit like that feeling you got as a teenager when you discovered a new band, that you wanted to keep to yourself, but tell everybody about at the same time. This book is like that. First of all, it’s not just a book of photos. It’s a work of art in its own right. Beautifully presented, with every detail obviously obsessed over, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to find wrapped around a David Sylvian CD. The typography alone is worth the price of entry. An astonishing number of photographers show absolutely zero design skills, or taste. Bruce Percy is not among that number.

The photography is masterful and close to unique. I’ll admit I’d got a bit jaded with Bruce’s long-exposure style, finding it all a little repetitive. But that was from looking at small JPGs on the web. Here, in print, all together and given space to breathe these photos come alive. Many people, starting with Michael Kenna of course, have done the low-light long-exposure thing. But Bruce adds his own character, and in particular an extremely delicate sensibility for colour to the mix, and avoids the heavy-handedness and sterility which so many Kenna copyists suffer from.

Iceland is a magnet for photographers, and these days is heavily over-exposed. As a source of dramatic, contrasty, saturated landscapes it’s pretty much endless. Point, shoot wind up the contrast to drama+11 in Photoshop, post it on Flickr and wait for the “great capture” comments to come flooding in. Well you won’t find any such great captures here. There is plenty of drama, and indeed contrast, but it is subtle, controlled, and feels part of the scene rather than plastered on top. Perhaps because Bruce works exclusively with colour slide film, a restricted and unforgiving medium which offers little scope for Photoshopping, the natural ambience doesn’t get suffocated, and a realistic luminosity pervades.

The cornerstone of this book, though, is a few hundred meters of black sand beach, where the outlet from the Jökulsarlon flows into the Atlantic. Although many thousands of photographers have visited this area, Bruce has captured - and seemingly been captured by - it’s soul. My reading is that this beach is in some way his muse. In a collection of photographs totally devoid of any sign of life or human intervention, these lonely scattered ice fragments are recomposed into living sculptures. I was very prepared to just shrug my shoulders and think “same old”, but I was very wrong. In fact I find the rest of the photos, to one degree or another, rather incidental in this context, and I keep coming back to the beach.

What I see here is not a book of landscape photographs, but a book which obliquely reveals something of the photographer. That’s pretty common in other areas, such as street or reportage, but not in landscape, where we tend to go for the pretty picture and the quick win. This book shows how a collection of work can be much stronger than a set of random images. Iceland is the stage, not the subject.

I didn’t need another book about Iceland. But I did need this.