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.