There is a particular silence that falls over a studio when the work has stopped flowing. It is not the comfortable quiet of an afternoon’s concentration, the small companionable hush of brushes drying or a print easing out of the printer tray. It is something heavier. The room holds its breath. The camera sits on the shelf and looks back at you with what feels like reproach, though, of course, it is only a camera, and cameras have no opinions. The reproach is your own, and you have lent it to the lens.

If you have come to abstract work seriously, you will know this silence. Sooner or later it visits every one of us. The ideas thin out. The eye dulls. The hand that reached so readily for the camera last month now finds reasons — small, plausible, almost respectable reasons — to do anything else. The kettle goes on. The emails get answered. The sock draw is tidied (and organised by colour…) with a sudden and suspicious thoroughness. And underneath all of it, a quiet panic begins to gather. *What if it has gone? What if I have nothing more to say?*

This is what I want to talk to you about this week. Not to fix it — there is no fix (sorry to dash your hopes so early in the essay), and anyone who sells you one is selling you something else as well (artistic snake oil, perhaps?) — but to sit with it for a while. To suggest, perhaps, that what feels like a death may be something quite different. It may be a fallow time. And on these islands, we know a thing or two about fallow ground.

—

When I first came to North Uist, the move itself swallowed the days. Boxes to unpack, a house to make habitable, getting over the stress of the move, the slow learning of where the wind comes from and which lochs catch the morning light. There was no question of making ‘real’ work; the settling was work enough. I told myself, with the easy confidence of someone not yet tested, that once the dust had cleared, I would begin. The landscape was extraordinary. The light was extraordinary. I had moved to the edge of the world, and the work would surely pour out of me.

It did not.

When at last the boxes were broken down and the home felt a bit more like home and the studio was, more or less, a studio, I picked up the camera and went out into the islands expecting some great rush of feeling. What I found instead was a strange flatness. The light was still extraordinary. The machair was still extraordinary. And I was, somehow, mute in front of it. I came home with nothing. I went out again. I came home with nothing again. Days became weeks. The weeks became something I would rather not count.

I did all the things a person does in that state. I rearranged the studio. I bought a book I did not need. I told myself I was *gathering*, which is what we tell ourselves when we are not making. I started three projects and finished none of them. I read about other people’s work and felt smaller. I picked up the camera and put it down again. I told nobody (especially you guys), because to say it out loud felt like an admission that I had made some terrible mistake in coming here at all.

I tell you this not as confession but as a kind of permission. If you are in that place now, you are not alone, and you have not failed, and you have not lost it. You are in the fallow time. And the fallow time, properly understood, is part of the work.

—

The crofters here know the value of letting ground rest. Talking to my neighbour, Callum John (the people here are often known by two names)I have learned that the soil here is rich and fertile, but thin. Dig down and you soon hit the Lewissian Gneiss, the immensely old and incredibly hard granite these islands are founded on – some of the oldest rocks on our planet. He has told me that if a field is worked too hard, year on year, it gives less and less until at last it gives nothing. The remedy is not to push harder. It is to leave it. To let the rain fall on it and the wind cross it and the small wild things come back into it, and in time — never on a schedule you can name — the ground recovers a richness it could not have held while it was being asked to perform. This is not a failure of the field. It is not the laziness of the farmer. It is how the thing actually works.

Our creative ground is no different. We have been sold, all of us, a peculiar idea that the artist should produce continuously, that any pause is a kind of moral failing, that if we are not posting and uploading and finishing and shipping, then we are somehow not artists at all. This is a story told mostly by the platforms that need our content. The artists I love have all had their fallow years. Hodgkin would work on a single small painting for a decade. Agnes Martin walked away from painting in 1967, drove out to a mesa in New Mexico, and did not lift a brush again for seven years; the work she came back to make is the work the world now queues to see. Cy Twombly went silent for long stretches and then erupted. The list is long and easy to extend. The fallow time is not the enemy of the work. It is, very often, the soil from which the next work grows.

So the first thing I would say to you is this: stop fighting it. The harder you grip the camera in a fallow time, the more it slips. The more you berate yourself for not making, the smaller and more frightened the work becomes. There is a kind of trust required here, and it is hard, and there is no way to learn it except by living through one of these periods and coming out the other side. You will. They end. They always end. But not, I am afraid, on the schedule you (or I) would prefer.

—

What broke my own fallow time, in the end, was not effort. It was a dog, and other people’s work, and the small histories of a place.

The dog was Eddie, of course – my dear and ever-present friend Eddie. We walked, he and I, day after day, regardless of weather (because having a dog as your best friend means going out for a walk no matter the weather, no matter your tiredness, no matter if your favourite program is on TV or not – you go), regardless of whether I had anything to say. I did not take the camera at first. I took only Eddie, and a coat, and one of my favourite hats (of which I have far too many – but that is a whole other confession) and whatever the day was giving. We walked the same tracks again and again, the same shorelines, the same paths between the lochs. And what I noticed, slowly, was that the repetition was teaching me something the dramatic outings had not. The same patch of machair was different every day. The same stretch of water held a different colour every hour. I was not looking for pictures. I was just looking. And in the not-looking-for, the looking itself began to come back.

This is worth saying plainly. *Looking is not the same as photographing.* In our hurry to make work we sometimes forget that the eye needs feeding, and that feeding the eye is a slow business. The fallow time may be the time when you most need to put the camera down and simply walk. Not as a productive exercise. Not as research. Just as the looking that any artist owes to the world they live in.

The other thing that broke the silence was looking at other people’s work. I went back, in those listless weeks, to the painters who had always meant something to me. I sat with Howard Hodgkin (and a wee dram beside the peat fire) and his small, dense, emotionally drenched panels, the way he could hold a whole holiday, a whole love affair, inside a frame the size of a book. I went back to Barbara Rae and her electric Hebridean colour, the way she takes a peat hag or a fence line and turns it into a chord. I sat for long evenings with Rothko (and more not-so-wee drams and roaring peat fires), who knew more about silence than most of us will ever learn. I read Sean Scully on the meaning of the stripe and the wall and the door, and I found in his rigour something that loosened my own paralysis.

None of this was research in any professional sense. It was something more like company. I needed to remember that I was part of a long conversation, that other people had stood where I was standing, that the work I admired had been made by humans who also had their dark weeks. Looking at their work did not make me want to copy them — and I would warn you against that always — but it made me want to *make* again. It rekindled something. It reminded me of what was possible.

And then, almost incidentally, I began to read the place itself. The poetry of these islands. The Gaelic place-names, each one a tiny compressed story. The history of Harris Tweed — those extraordinary women dyeing wool with lichen and crotal and the deep peat-brown of the moor, weaving by the rhythm of the sea. I was not, at this point, making any work at all. But I was filling up. I was becoming, very slowly, a person with something to say.

When the work came back, it came back changed. It was the work that walking with Eddie and reading the place and sitting with Hodgkin and Rae had made possible. None of it could have been made by the version of me who had arrived in Uist demanding pictures from the landscape. The fallow time had not been wasted. It had been the necessary preparation for what came next, though I had not been able to see that from inside it.

—

So if you are in the silence now, here is what I would gently suggest, knowing that none of it is a cure and all of it is only the offering of one person who has been there and come back.

Walk. Take the dog or take only yourself, but walk, and walk the same places again and again. Let the repetition do its slow work. Resist the urge to make every walk productive. Some walks are for the body and the eye and nothing else. The photographs will come back when they are ready, and not before.

Go and look at other people’s work. Not in a panic, not to compare, not to scroll. Sit with one artist for an evening. Choose someone whose work has always moved you, or someone you have been meaning to look at properly, and give them an hour of your full attention. Read what they said about their own practice. Look at how they handled colour or edge or silence. Let them remind you that the conversation you are part of is long and rich and far older than you are.

Read around your place. Whatever place that is. Read its poets, its histories, its makers. Read about the textiles and the songs and the kitchen recipes and the names of the fields. The work that comes out of you eventually will be richer for having a soil to grow in. We are not making pictures in a vacuum. We are making them as people with bodies, in particular places, with particular weather, surrounded by particular ghosts. Feed all of that.

Keep a notebook for the fallow time. Not a list of pictures to make, that pressure is the last thing you need, but a place for the small noticings. A colour you saw on the way to the shop. A shape the gulls made. A phrase from a poem that snagged. Half-thoughts about a project you might one day do. The notebook is for after. When the spark returns, and it will, you will go back to those pages and find the seeds you laid down without knowing.

And, this matters, be kind to yourself. The voice in your head that says *you have lost it, you were never any good, you should give up* is not telling you the truth. It is telling you that you are frightened, which is a different thing entirely. Frightened is a feeling. It is not a verdict. Treat it the way you would treat a friend who came to you in the same state: with patience, with company, with a shared dram, with the assumption that the storm will pass.

—

The fallow time is part of the work. Say it again, because the culture we live in will keep trying to convince you otherwise. *The fallow time is part of the work.* It is not the absence of practice. It is a different phase of practice. The ground is doing what the ground needs to do. Your job, in these weeks or months, is not to force the field. Your job is to keep walking it, to keep your eyes open, to feed it with whatever rain and wind and small wild noticings come your way.

And then, one morning, with no fanfare and no announcement, you will lift the camera and something will move in you and you will press the shutter and it will feel, again, like the most natural thing in the world. You will wonder why you ever doubted. And you will probably forget, until the next fallow time comes, that you ever did.

But until then, and there is no shame in this, no failure in this, no reason to hide it from yourself or each other, let the field rest. Walk with the dog. Sit with the painters who have gone before. Read the poems of the place you happen to be standing in. Trust that the silence is not the end of the work. It is, very often, the beginning of the work you have not yet been able to imagine.

The spark comes back. It came back for me, and it will come back for you. Our part is to be ready for it when it does, and to have done, in the waiting, the quiet, unglamorous, essential work of keeping ourselves alive to the world.

That is the work too. Perhaps it is the main work. The pictures, when they come, are only what is left over.

The cattle grid at the end of the track had been iced over for three days. I had walked past it each morning with Eddie, who paid it no attention because his paws do not slip the way mine do, and each morning I had glanced at the field beyond it and kept moving. Flat winter light, the kind that irons shadows out of the world. Brown grass, grey sky, a smear of darker grey where the lochan sits in the low ground. Nothing to photograph. Or rather: nothing to photograph if what I was looking for was something to explain.

On the fourth day, as we returned from our evening sortie, I stopped. I am not sure why. Probably the evening light changed my perspective. I took the camera out and made a handful of ME burst mode exposures, moving it slowly back and forth, the kind of gesture that produces what might generously be called movement studies and what might more honestly be called ‘mush’. Then I put the camera away, stepped carefully over the grid, and walked on.

When I came to the files that evening, one of them made me sit forward. It did not look like the field. It did not look like the lochan or the cattle grid or the smear of darker grey. It looked like something half-remembered from a place I could not quite name. I kept returning to it. Not because it was resolved, but because it was not. There was something in it that kept asking me back, and that asking was the point.

This is what I has been playing on my mind ever since: the idea of staying with not-knowing, and what it costs us when we refuse.

You are all technically capable here. You can handle the camera, bend the software, manage the layering. That competence is real and hard-won, and there is nothing wrong with it. But it can bring a particular temptation: to reach, too quickly, for clarity. For legibility. For the version of the image that can be explained in a sentence. The competent hand wants to resolve. And sometimes that is exactly the wrong instinct.

The images that have lasted longest in my own practice, the ones I keep returning to across months and years, are almost never the clean ones. They are the ones where the subject is half-remembered, half-imagined. Where I cannot quite name what I am looking at. Where the image holds a question rather than offering an answer. Those are the ones that keep asking me back in. They contain doubt.

I think we need to separate intention from over-determination, because they are not the same thing and we sometimes speak as though they are.

Intention, as I understand it, is about arriving with a question. What am I drawn to here? What am I willing to risk? It is a frame held loosely, a direction rather than a destination. Over-determination is something else entirely. It is when I have already decided what the image must be before I have made it, when I am bending everything, the subject, the gesture, the processing, simply to confirm what I settled on in advance. The image becomes a vehicle for a thesis already written. It arrives pre-sealed. There is no air left in it.

Bruce Percy (who, you will be excited to hear, I am interviewing later in the summer for ARBN) has spoken about allowing the landscape to suggest the photograph rather than imposing a preconceived image onto it. I find this enormously useful, not as a general philosophy but as a practical discipline on any given day. You can arrive at a location with a loose conceptual frame, loss, perhaps, or persistence, or the feeling of something that has just passed through, without already knowing what the images must look like. The work then has the possibility of talking back to you. You are not transcribing; you are listening. I am drawn to the openness of this approach.

When intention holds space for surprise, something more porous emerges. And porousness is worth protecting.

There is a painter whose work I keep returning to when I think about this: Antoni Tàpies. A recent discovery of mine, but I think I am late to the party in this.

His surfaces are not decorative. They carry sand, marble dust, crumbled paint, scratched-back marks, layers that half-reveal and half-conceal what came before. You cannot read a Tàpies painting in the way you read a sign; the marks resist that kind of extraction. They propose. They suggest. They sometimes refuse altogether. And yet the work is never arbitrary. There is intention there, deep and serious intention, but it holds room for the material to speak, for the process to leave its own trace.

What Tàpies understood, I think, is that a surface which has been lived in is not the same as a surface which has been designed. The accumulation of decisions, the traces of earlier states, the marks that were almost erased but not quite: these are not impurities to be cleaned away. They are the record of genuine engagement. The image holds the history of its own making, and that history is part of what makes it resonant.

Frances Walker knows this too, from her end of the practice.

Her paintings and prints of the Hebrides are, in some sense, legible: headlands, water, islands, weather. But there is always something withheld. Edges dissolve into weather. Marks accumulate into dense passages that feel less like depiction and more like the memory of having stood in a place through multiple seasons, in changing light, carrying different things. What I take from Walker is the value of accumulation and erasure as a way of thinking. Her surfaces carry traces of earlier decisions, over-painted forms, ghost marks, passages scraped back, evidence of how the image became itself. The final thing is not separate from its history; it contains it.

In multiple-exposure and ICM work, we have something directly analogous. When we layer exposures that do not align neatly, we allow earlier gestures to remain visible as ghosts within the final frame. The image carries its own archaeology. Ambiguity here is not only in the subject; it is in the visibility of process. You can see, or sense, that there were earlier moments, earlier attempts, earlier ways of looking, and that they have not been tidied away.

The temptation with our tools can be to always tidy. To mask, blend, smooth, until the underlying uncertainty is invisible and the image looks decided. But what if those failed layers, those awkward overlaps, those earlier gestures that did not quite work, are integral to the meaning? What if the final image is less a window and more a record of ongoing negotiation?

There is also something worth saying about ambiguity and the world we are making photographs inside.

The culture we live in produces confident images at extraordinary volume. Advertising, propaganda, social media, they all speak in assertions. They have already decided what you should feel. They are closed, in the way I mean: pre-sealed, the air removed. To make work that refuses this register, work that does not resolve into a quick meaning, work that asks for slower, more uncertain attention, is, in itself, a kind of positioning.

But this comes with its own responsibility. Ambiguity is not automatically a virtue. The question we have to hold honestly is whether we are obscuring in order to reveal something difficult, something that clarity would flatten, or whether we are simply avoiding the work of being clear where clarity is needed. Ambiguity as evasion and ambiguity as depth look identical from the outside. Only the maker knows, or should know, which one they are standing in. And sometimes, if we are being rigorous, we have to admit that we are not entirely sure.

I think we can also learn to tune the degree of not-knowing in our work more deliberately than we sometimes do, rather than treating it as something that simply arrives by accident when the technique is messy enough.

One way is to work with subjects that are already on the edge of dissolving: reflections, weather, foliage in strong wind, shadows on water. And then to push them, deliberately, a little further past recognition than feels comfortable. Not to destroy the image, but to ask yourself, at each stage, how much the viewer actually needs in order for the image to hold. You might be surprised by how little.

Another way is to pay attention to the anchors you habitually give the viewer, and to try, in at least some work, to remove them. No horizon line. No isolated legible object. No colour that says the word forest or the word sunset before the viewer has had time to bring their own weather. These are constraints, but they are generative ones. They define a territory of uncertainty within which you can wander. They also, usefully, reveal where you tend to resolve ambiguity too soon, where your hand reaches for safety before you have asked whether safety is what the image needs.

All of this is easier to write about than to live with.

In practice, doubt shows up. Is this anything, or just a mess? (Just more ‘mush’, Chinnery?) Am I staying with something genuine, or have I simply avoided doing the work? The question comes at different points for different people. For me it often comes in the evening, looking at what I made in the morning, when the cold of the field has worn off and the slightly magical version of the day has been replaced by its more ordinary self.

I made an image some months ago as I struggled with my current project, something that felt, when I set it aside, like a failure. It had not done what I hoped. It fell short. I left it open in Photoshop and moved on. A day later I came past it, still sitting there on the screen, and something made me pause. I looked at it again. It was not, it turned out, the total loss I had decided it was. There was something in it, something lurking in the tonal relationships, something in the way the layers had disagreed with each other. Five minutes of attention, not rescue, just attention, and it had found its way into my saved collection. It is still there. I still do not entirely know what it is about. And I find I am content with that. Whether it makes the final cut is not, right now, of any importance. I am just content to cogitate on it for a while longer. I am learning up here that there really is no rush in all this.

I do not think the answer to doubt is to eliminate it. I think the answer is to learn to navigate inside it without being paralysed. This means, in practice, separating making from judging: giving yourself permission to produce unresolved work, and resisting the urge to immediately classify it as success or failure. Letting images sit. Returning to them when you are less decided about them. Looking at the rejects, periodically, not to find what went wrong but to find what is alive in them, what strange collision or accidental void might be the seed of something.

It also means noticing the language you use when you talk to yourself about your work. When you say, “This is about X,” you have already closed something. The more useful formulation is softer: “I was curious about,” or “I was testing what happens if.” Those phrases keep the image open. They leave room for it to be something else than what you decided it was.

The images I trust most, in my own practice and in the work I find myself returning to, are the ones that remain slightly out of reach. Not because they are withholding something knowable, not because they are puzzles, but because they are genuinely still asking. They hold their uncertainty the way the lochan holds the weather: not as a failure to be something else, but as a condition of their own particular life.

As you head into the next making cycle, you might carry one or two of these questions quietly with you.

Where are you trying to force your images to mean more clearly than they want to? And what would it look like, in the work, to honour the ambiguity that is already there?

Have a wonderful time making stuff everyone. relish the process.

If this is the kind of content you have been hungry for, FYV is a small community of photographers who are quietly leaving the rules behind and finding their own way into more painterly, more abstract, more personal work. We would be very glad to have you. You can find out more here and enjoy a two-week free trial period of over 500 hours of content, with no obligation to join.

There is a small loch about ten minutes from the house. Nothing remarkable about it. A scoop of fresh water held in a saucer of peat and stone, ringed by a few wind-shaped willows and one stubborn rowan that ought, by rights, to have given up years ago. I have walked past it so many times already, walking with Eddie. I could not, if you asked me, tell you the exact shape of its eastern shore, or the precise place where the path narrows into bog. The loch and I are on cordial but unsentimental terms.

A few weeks ago I made a photograph of it. Or rather, I made a photograph in its general direction, which is not quite the same thing. I had been working with multiple exposures, experimenting between bright and dark mode, comparing results, moving the camera in slow, drifting arcs as I pressed the shutter in burst mode, the way you might move your eye across a memory you are trying to retrieve rather than a scene you are trying to record. When I looked at the back of the camera afterwards, the loch was still there, more or less. But the rowan had gone. The path had gone. The eastern shore had become a pale suggestion, a kind of breath. What was left was the mood of the place, not the place itself.

I stood in the wind for a moment (because here in the Outer Hebrides, seldom is there no wind) and thought: the photograph has forgotten almost everything. And then I thought: and that is exactly why I like it.

Forgetting is not the same as losing

There is a temptation, when we first encounter abstract photography, to describe it in the language of subtraction. The image has lost its detail. The subject has been stripped away. The picture has given up its information. All of these are perfectly accurate, and all of them are slightly wrong.

A photograph that loses its detail sounds like a photograph that has failed at its job. A photograph that forgets its detail is doing something quite different. It is choosing what not to hold. It is leaving room for something else to come in.

What comes in, I think, is the viewer.

A representational landscape, made cleanly and competently, performs a generous service. It says: this is what was there. This is what it looked like. This is the proof of the place, the light. A sacred moment. And the viewer, in receiving this evidence, is a kind of grateful guest. The photograph has done the seeing. The viewer agrees to be shown.

A photograph that has forgotten almost everything cannot do this. It has no evidence to offer. It has no proof. What it has, instead, is a hollow, into which the viewer is invited to bring their own weather, their own walks, their own lochs. Their own soul. The image becomes less like a window and more like a bowl. It does not show you a scene. It holds a space, and asks you, “What have you brought with you to put in it?”

The artists who taught me this

I came to it slowly, and largely through painters. But there are photographers who knew it long before I did, and who held the door open for the rest of us.

Utah Bath is one. Her photographs of nothing very much, ordinary corners of light and wall, the way an afternoon falls across a curtain, are nominally about almost no subject at all. What they are really about is the looking. She made the looking visible. The remarkable thing about a Barth photograph is that you finish it not knowing what you have seen, but very aware of how you have been seeing.

Saul Leiter is another, although he came at it from the opposite direction. Where Barth subtracts, Leiter clutters. Rain on glass, a coat in the foreground, the back of someone’s head. The subject is always partly hidden, partly elsewhere. The photograph forgets to be about the thing in the middle of the frame. What you remember afterwards is not what was photographed but what it felt like to look through the rain and almost catch it. A glimpse into a sacred secret found in the mundane everyday.

And further back, in the very last paintings of J. M. W. Turner there is the same gift. He was accused, in his late period, of producing soapsuds and whitewash. The accusation was correct, in a sense. The paintings have forgotten almost everything that a respectable Victorian landscape was supposed to remember. What they have kept is the light, and the weather, and a kind of held breath. They are still arguing for the value of forgetting, two centuries later.

A small invitation, for the next walk

I am not going to tell you to go and forget things on purpose. Forgetting, when forced, becomes a different thing entirely; it becomes pose. But I will offer one small thing to try, the next time you are out with a camera in a place you know well.

Stop in front of something familiar. A favourite tree, the corner of a beach, a particular bend of road. Look at it for a long minute, longer than feels comfortable. Then ask, quietly: if I made a photograph of this place that forgot almost everything about it, what would it choose to keep? Not what would be sharp, not what would be in the rule of thirds, not what would survive an Instagram crop. What would the photograph remember, if it could only remember one thing?

Then, only then, lift the camera. You may find the answer is movement, or colour, or a single line of dark against pale. You may find the answer surprises you. You may find, as I did at the loch, that a place you thought you knew rather well had a private mood you had been walking past for years.

Photographs are not obliged to remember everything. Most of the best ones, I have come to think, remember rather little. What they keep is what mattered. And that, I suspect, is also what we are doing when we look at them: not consulting a record, but quietly remembering, on their behalf, what it felt like to be there.

If this is the kind of looking you have been hungry for, FYV is a small community of photographers who are quietly leaving the rules behind and finding their own way into more painterly, more abstract, more personal work. We would be very glad to have you. You can find out more here. And if you join soon (as I write at the beginning of May 2026), you can use the code VISION15 to get 15% discount on the annual membership on top of the usual two free months, and two-week free trial period.

Grainy sand damp crackling in seafire
A sentinel shore chalkscrawled on lemon farls
The slabbed tangle of shattered glass
Unsought by flyblown faces of the gone
Nearer the edge of wild air, of brightness here
Sinking ever as blue dusk abandoned this night
The flood flow from road to eely grike
A tide, moondrawn, lay over the rocks
Behind this light of Cassiopeia
Endless signs on a white field
The veil of space falls our souls the more, the more.
DSC 02.21

Ink Stained and tangled seaweed
Smouldering in seafire
Broken on sentinel shore
Halting hightide out in rushing rhythms
Cottage smoke whispwrithes into a silverblack, lightless night
Wild edge and wild air whip and froth
Under a creeping moons midwatch
And yet to go still against the cold pull
There to weave and unweave shadowshoals
And haul home through skerried squalls
DSC 03.21

In London on a flying visit for a meeting, I just had time for a brief visit to Tate Britain. There I enjoyed a precious hour in the company of Van Gogh and an artist new to me, Frank Bowling. Both exhibitions, lessons in the sheer joy of colour.

Naturally, I had my camera and as I wandered the rooms in wonder I made a few images. Later, on the train northwards, I began to reflect on the fact that the images on my memory card were made from the art of others. (the image on the left was made at the Frank Bowling exhibition from multiple exposures of two of his paintings combined and then altered in Lightroom). This raises an interesting question about the ethics of using the art of others, in our work.

It is certainly true to say that no art is new – not really. The often quoted (indeed, mis-quoted and mis-attributed) words ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ can be used in this discussion. (If you would like to read more about the possible origins and variations of this quote, please take a look at this discussion – https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/06/artists-steal/ ). 

What is the sense behind the quote? That all of us as creatives are influenced by those who have gone before us. (How many also talk of ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’?). From our earliest days we absorb so much from what we see, hear and read. We look at the work of artists we admire and, so often, either consciously or sub-consciously, this influences the work we create. I am not talking about plagiarism. That is theft, a malicious and intentional decision to take the work of someone else and pass it off as our own. 

No, the idea behind ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ relates to imitation verses inspiration. It is so much easier to imitate those we admire. It takes real effort to be inspired without merely imitating. This is because you recognise an idea in someones work – then put forth great effort to elevate, to add, to move it further in another direction – to make it into something else. Certainly, the influence may be felt – an echo of the informer, but it becomes something distinctly yours.

So, back to my original question – which in our field, working with a camera and perhaps making images which actually might include the work of others – is this not closer to plagiarism than influence – and certainly more like imitation? Hopefully, we aren’t making a straight image of another’s and passing it off as our own (or copying an image from a web page, for example, and then claiming it as ours – that is plagiarism. It does happen too – I can think of an example happening to a friend of mine).

However, in making images from the art of another where does the line of acceptance fall between it being too close to copying and it becoming a unique work of our own? Whether we include the brush strokes of a great and recognised artist as I have above – or perhaps we use some local graffiti? Do we work with mixed media, collaging elements from magazines and photographs? Could it be we photograph signs and graphics – all these things contain the ‘art’ of others.

There are no photography police (although plenty of people who try to set themselves up in this role). We have no book of rules to which we can refer. So it is down to us to individually set our own high standard of morals and ethics in this regard.

What is the point of copying the work of another, altering it a little and claiming it as our own? We may receive praise from those who don’t realise what we have done – but how do we feel when we look at ourselves in the mirror?

We each need to decide where the line in the sand is for us. Valda Bailey, uses a good illustration. She talks of musicians who ‘mash up’ the music of others to make new, original tracks. You can often pick up on a familiar beat, a recognisable rift or refrain – perhaps some repeated lyrics from an oft sung chorus – but the new artist has also gone to great lengths to significantly add to and alter the original to make something new. It is no longer the original. Perhaps this could be our guide? But only we can decide.

Maybe a good barometer would be to ask ourselves, how would we feel if our artwork was being used in the images of another? How changed would we want it to be before we felt its use was acceptable? Would we feel flattered by its use? Or offended?

This also leads to another, final point from me on this subject. When making images (or any kind of art) from that of others, is it not the right and decent thing to give fulsome attribution. To mention the fact openly and honestly? Why hide it? If you feel you should, then perhaps that is an indication that you haven’t changed the original source enough with work of your own? And we could ask ourself, wouldn’t we like someone who used our work to give us credit for our influence on them and for the part our work has played in the creation of theirs? 

In this, should we not be treating the work, the reputation and the feelings of the source artists in the way we would like others to treat us? (and in saying this, I should perhaps acknowledge this is not an original thought of my own either, but can also be found at Matthew 7:12 – seems there is nothing new…)

Post Script. My personal response to the Van Gogh exhibition was to write a short, untitled, poem.

I stood
amidst crowds alone
in those echoing, hallowed halls
beneath Vincents starry canopy
who thru his fired look
revealed in me
an aching joy
surging from such swift simplicity
for in his pleading eyes
I saw, as he
the absolute ecstasy
of golden highs
and cerulean skies
an awakening there
to be free
and to walk again
the fields aflame
under pollarded willows and gain
mastery once more
over my shadows.

DSC August 2019

My new book – ‘Abstract Mindedness’ is available from the publishers, Kozu Books, for worldwide delivery now HERE

Land | Sea is the new release and the first in a new concept of publication from quality photography book publisher, Triplekite.

The new concept is based around an idea to provide a format which can be published around three times a year allowing portfolios from five photographers to be showcased. Triplekite have set themselves a difficult brief in this as they want to keep the selling price low, at £20, while maintaining their reputation for using very high quality print processes and materials coupled with design which focuses on the beauty of the images.

Have they succeeded? Most certainly. I was very keen to get my hands on a copy, indeed I held off doing the review until I had seen the physical book even though I get a sneak preview of the pdf prior to it going to print Lets take the physical quality of the book first. I was initially struck by the feel of the front cover. The soft cover material has a waxy coating which gives the book a luxury finish. Inside that care and attention to detail is reflected in the way two different paper weights have been used through the book. The pages on which the images are printed are of a substantial weight and thickness, but interleaved between them the pages which divide the photographers portfolios and the pages with the foreword etc are printed on a much lighter, almost translucent bible paper. It is attention to detail like this which elevates Triplekite publications and shows the people behind the books really care about what they are producing rather than being focused solely on profit.

The graphic design of the book also demonstrates the same attention to detail and love of the images. The typography and colour scheme is quiet and understated, done specifically to keep the attention on the photographs, I’m sure. To compliment this, space is given to the images and they are laid out in such a way as to ensure they are the main focus of the publication. The book is 320 x 240mm, softbound with 68 pages and I found the page size easier to cope with than the larger pages of the ‘Sea Fever’ book, also published by Triplekite and as such it fits on my bookshelves better.

There is an introduction by Tim Parkin of OnLandscape, who has collaborated on the project, where he discusses self expression in photography and a special treat for lovers of fine photography is an afterword written by Paul Kenny. It is a fascinating thoughtful piece which he describes as “Musings on the relationship between landscape, photography and art”.

The featured photographers in this first edition are Joe Wright, Valda Bailey, Al Brydon, Giles McGarry and Finn Hopson. This choice of artists is interesting. Many publishers would go down the route of selecting individuals who all produce identikit work, work in the same style so that it appealed to lovers of that one style. However, this group of photographers have very diverse approaches to their art. As a result you are likely to find something new which excites you, much like buying a compilation album and discovering an artist you were previously unaware of in amongst the familiar tracks.

I think this approach is perfect. It encourages us to consider a broader range of styles and to question our own approaches to photography, rather than just focusing our book buying on photographers whose work is perhaps similar to our own or who are ‘safe’ buys.

In the case of all the photographers in this issue, I was aware of all of them, but even so, I wasn’t prepared for just how exciting some of the work was. Take Joe Wright, as an example. I have seen many of Joes images before and loved them, indeed I have met and enjoyed Joes company up in the Lakes. But, despite this, I wasn’t ready for just how wonderful his images were in Land | Sea. From the opening, full page image of Crocosmia flowers in the rain through to his woodland images and his intimate rock abstracts I was enthralled. I think, seeing his images here, that Joe needs a book to himself!

Brilliantly contrasting with Joes quiet landscapes and intimate landscape details, his portfolio is followed by that of Valda Bailey. And what a contrast. Valdas images, using multiple exposure techniques are full of passion and colour, vibrance and drama. Her portfolio demonstrates how being experimental and letting go of the more ‘standard’ conventions of landscape photography can free you and open up a new world of photographic opportunities. Here is another photographer who I can see having her own dedicated book in the not too distant future.

And so it goes through the book, next is Al Brydons dark, moody landscapes, often of neglected places or those less noticed, revealing a hidden beauty. Giles McGarrys fine monochrome architectural images (and I can see special attention has gone into the printing of Giles monochrome images as the reproduction of the tones is excellent and I know it is tricky to do this without special processes being employed – another testament to Triplekite putting the image quality in front of profit, bravo!) contrast with these superbly, highlighting what can be achieved with long exposures and intense attention to detail in image processing and finally, the book concludes with Finn Hopsons careful, quiet and soothing landscapes of his beloved South Downs. Wonderful pastoral images made in gentle light.

To accompany each photographers portfolio is a short essay from them on their approach, background and thoughts on image making. Particularly appreciated is a page from each in which they detail their personal photographic influences and role models which is a great springboard for us, as lovers of photography, to go off exploring and discovering even more fine work. This makes it an even more valuable resource.

I foresee that this series is going to become very collectable and will build into a great library of photographers portfolios over time. Triplekite have announced the next group of photographers who are to be featured in volume two and I am already salivating over the thought of seeing the edition.

Is there anything I would change? Hunger for images means I would love to see a couple more pages per photographer to allow for some more photographs and some more in depth comments from them, but I also understand the financial implications of enlarging the publication. On the whole, I have to say, Land | Sea exceeded my expectations both in quality of production and content, so there is little else I can think of to improve it. I guess things like inserting Q codes to take us straight to the photographers web sites could be put in, that might be a useful touch for some. Maybe an audio interview could be added to the Triplekite website with each photographer to extend the article? But all these things take time and resources and I do think the price point of the publication is important.

So I would encourage you to go to the Triplekite website, HERE, and purchase your own copy. You can also buy a print from any of the photographers featured in the book for just £20 (buy all five and you get one free) so this is a superb opportunity to collect images from photographers you love at an amazing price. Still available on the website is David Bakers ‘Sea Fever’ and Dav Thomas’s book ‘With Trees’.

I hope you enjoy the book as much as I have.

Disclaimer: In the interests of journalistic integrity I want to make it clear I get a free copy of the publication under review from Triplekite. The above link is also an affiliate link so if you use it I get a small commission. However, I can also honestly state that Triplekite make no attempt whatsoever to influence what I say about their books. They do not see (or ask to see) what I write prior to publication and they do not ask me to alter what I write (except if I make an error regarding technical details. If I don’t like any aspect of the books, I will say so. I take my integrity very seriously.

If you do wish to buy the book and use a link which does NOT give me any commission then this link HERE will do that for you. As a consequence of being a professional teacher, writer, photographer and active member of the photographic community it is inevitable that I will know many of the photographers featured in the books I review. Some are now close friends, others are acquaintances and some I know fleetingly or just by reputation. I hope all of these understand that as a reviewer I have to try and stand back from any personal relationships and give my honest review of what I see and read. If I praise the work I genuinely feel it deserves praise. If I am less complimentary then I will always try never to be unkind but always to be honest, but it will never be personal and I trust that if what I say is less than glowing that we can remain friends? I have come to realise that reviewers walk a minefield, but walk it they must.

Yesterday Scotland bit back as it often does. Perhaps it feels the need to just remind us, after a day as good as yesterday, that it is still in charge and we should not get complacent. We awoke to driving rain and very low cloud and this continued throughout the day. Scotland is capable of throwing significant amounts of rain at you and I suppose we shouldn’t complain. After all, it is the weather here that goes a long way to forming the land into what it is that makes it so attractive to us as landscape photographers.

If any days was going to be wet, this was the best one for us as we were moving on from Glencoe up to Skye. After checking out we descended from the Kings House Hotel up on Rannoch Moor down Glencoe (stopping for a brief visit to the site of my fall last January which resulted in my broken leg and ankle. I grabbed some iPhone images but most definitely didn’t attempt to re-cross the river!). With little hope we detoured to Stalker Castle but on arrival the rain miraculously eased and blessed us with an hour or so of just the odd spate of drizzle. It was enough, coupled with a sufficiently high tide, to capture some great long exposure images of this castle which sits on its own island out in Loch Linne. A second benefit of a visit to Castle Stalker is the chance to pop in the cafe, which has nice views over the castle and serves exceedingly good cakes.

From there the rain returned and battered us all the way from the Castle to Skye. Even our stop at Eilean Donan Castle was hampered by rain. We were more than pleased to arrive at our base for the next four nights, the Sligachan Hotel which sits nestled under the mighty Cullin mountains. All this rain means the rivers and waterfalls are raging and the shooting over the next few days look interesting. The forecast is for the rain receding, temperatures dropping (with a chance of a dusting of snow on the tops of the Cullin) and some rising winds.

The next few days look interesting!

Let me start by saying I don’t issue limited edition prints myself. Although some would argue that I sell so few prints they are all, in fact, limited editions. 🙂

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those blogs where I witter on about the joys of shooting on film. I have also resisted the temptation of January 1st blogs which feature either “my best shots of last year” or “My resolutions for the year ahead”.