Category: Photography Ideas

The Meanbh-Chuileag

Posted on August 30, 2026 by - Abstract Photography, Photographic Expressionism, Photography comment, Photography Ideas

Most evenings this week, there has come a moment when the wind has lain itself down on the machair and the island has fallen quiet. The rushes stop their small tin-hiss. The washing line stops its slow drift. Eddie, always alert despite seemingly deep in sleep, lifts his head from the mat and looks at me, because he can hear what I can hear, which is nothing. A stillness so complete it is almost audible. It is the kind of stillness the guidebooks call peaceful and the ferry brochures photograph.

It is not peaceful. It is a warning.

I have lived here now for just over a year, and I have learned what a still evening on North Uist actually means. It means the wind has dropped below the threshold, five or six miles an hour, maybe less, at which the meanbh-chuileag, what the rest of the world knows as the midge, can lift herself from the peat. And once she can lift, she rises in her thousands. Then her hundreds of thousands. Then in the numbers we only ever describe in weather, a cloud, a fog, a ceò, because the language of a single fly no longer holds. She comes up out of the moor as if the moor itself has decided to breathe out, and she wants blood, and she is not fussy about whose. But mainly she seems intent on mine.

I stand at the studio door in the good light of a windless August evening and understand that the evening I would have chosen to walk out with the camera has just been taken from me. Not by rain, which I love. Not by cloud, which I love more. But by a creature roughly a millimetre long, whose Gaelic name, meanbh-chuileag, tiny fly, is one of the great pieces of Highland understatement. It sits in the same family as a wee bit of a breeze that flattens your brassicas, or a nice soft day that soaks you to the bone in three minutes.

The trap of the calm day

I want to dwell on this for a moment, because it took me a while to see it. I am not very quick on the uptake. In my first months here I read the island the way an incomer reads it, the way I used to read the mainland weather when I was still teaching from a car park in the Peak District. Back in those far off days, a calm day was a working day. A calm day was an outdoor day. A calm day was the day you loaded the pack and drove out to the shore, because the light would not be rushed off the water and the long exposures you had been waiting for became finally possible.

I know now that on North Uist a calm July or August day is very often a midge day, and a midge day is not a working day outdoors. It is a warning painted onto the atmosphere in invisible ink. The moor is telling me, in the only language the moor speaks, that if I try to go out and stand in one place for the time a picture needs, five minutes, ten, half an hour, I will not be photographing the machair. I will be photographing my own capitulation, mid-slap, mid-grumble, walking back to the pick-up with tears streaming and a red rash climbing the back of my neck, destined to scratch for days.

It has taken me some months to accept that the still evening is not the gift my mainland eye once thought it was. It is a particular kind of Hebridean event, and it belongs to the meanbh-chuileag before it belongs to me. The sensible thing is to bow to the arrangement and go and do something else.

Not stronger than the moor

There is a temptation, when a working day is taken from you, to fight for it. To stand at the window and calculate. To reach for the head net and the smidge and the trousers tucked into socks, and to try to win. To be valiant, unbowed. Manly. To walk out anyway, because you had planned to walk out. I have done all of this. It never ends well. The retreat is rather pathetic and humiliating, frankly. It ends with a picture that isn’t really about the picture. It is about my determination to make a picture on a day the island had already declined to give.

I have arrived, slowly, at a small principle that I need to admit to, even though it will sound obvious to anyone who has lived here longer than a season. I am not stronger than the moor. I am not stronger than the weather. I am not going to negotiate my way past a species that has been in these islands for as long as anyone has been here to be bitten by them, and that has already outlasted every attempt to catch, poison, trap or repel it. She rises when the wind drops. That is the deal. She is neither cruel nor thoughtful. She is meanbh-chuileag, and she is doing what a fly does with a fly’s whole life, which is to feed and to breed and to leave more of herself behind before the cold comes.

I can rage at her, or I can rearrange the working day around her. Only one of those actually has any chance of success.

What she moves me to

So I am learning to let the midge edit me.

When the wind drops and the solasbreac of a still evening comes in through the bothy door, I close the bothy door, and I go and I paint, or edit some images. Not begrudgingly. Not as a second-best, waiting for the outdoor day to return. But with something that is beginning, at last, to feel like consent. A working consent to the shape the island has offered.

The paintings that come out of these forced-in evenings have a quality I could not have got standing in a windless field slapping at my ears. They are still. Their marks are slower. Their palettes are the palettes I remember from the walk that morning, rather than the palettes in front of me, which is, I am starting to think, the palette I actually want. The remembered dath, not the observed one. The moor at one remove.

I lay out primed panels I gessoed weeks ago. I put on the BBC, Radio 4. Calm descends. Eddie takes his place on the rug near the door. Elizabeth is upstairs in the cottage at her own craft work, and the sounds of nature outside, the cries of geese on the loch, a pair of Ravens cronking overhead, keeps me company through the wall. My hand finds the carborundum plate I was going to develop next week, and I bring it forward instead. I mix a run of colours I could not have come up with an hour ago: a peat black warmed with a rust the moor has been carrying all afternoon, a bone the colour of the lower sky over Balranald, a machair straw that is really the inside of a shell more than the outside of a grass.

The midge has decided my medium for the evenings work. And I am, oddly, grateful.

The editor at the window

Here is the part I did not expect. The meanbh-chuileag is, for me, becoming a kind of editor. Not the editor with the red pencil who trims the sentence. The editor before the editor, the one who says: not this evening, this evening you make something else. She is the first cut. She removes an option before I have to.

Anyone who has tried to hold a working practice steady over years knows how tiring the option of ‘everything is possible’ becomes. On a mainland studio day I had to decide, unaided, what to do with the light I had been given. On a still North Uist evening the midge has already decided. My job is to accept the shape of the decision, walk twenty paces to a different door, and get to work.

There are worse editors. And there is a lesson in the small thing making the large decision, a lesson about scale and about who gets to shape a day, that keeps returning to me as I paint. I stood in our garden three mornings ago in the early light, looking out toward Loch Sandarraigh beyond our drystone wall, and watched a hen harrier lift over the peat and change the whole feeling of a hundred acres just by being there. Now I am watching a creature the length of a full stop rearrange a hundred acres of my working week. Both are teaching the same thing. The size of the mover is not the size of the movement. Small things move large things all the time on this island, if you are prepared to be moved.

The Gaelic word does the work

I keep returning to the Gaelic. (the seemingly impossible language I am trying very badly to learn) Meanbh-chuileag. Tiny fly. Nothing dramatic about it, nothing romantic, no exaggeration of the misery the creature actually causes. Gaelic naming, so far as I can read the little I can read of it, tends to this quiet accuracy. It is the same accuracy that gives us ceò for mist and dìle bhàite for the kind of downpour that drowns things, without any need for a Homeric adjective. The word describes what the thing is, and lets the thing be what it is.

I think this is why the language keeps drawing me. Not because it is beautiful, though it often is, but because it names things with the confidence of long acquaintance. English tries to sell you a feeling. Gaelic points at the thing. If I keep spending time with these words, carefully, as a beginner, without pretending fluency I do not have, I think my pictures might learn a little of the same discipline. Point at the thing. Do not embellish. Trust that the thing, well pointed at, will contain its own weight.

Perhaps this is one of the small gifts of the meanbh-chuileag week. She has driven me out of the outdoor sentence and into the indoor one, and in the indoor one I have had time to read for an hour before painting, and to sit with the Gaelic name and feel the fit of it.

The rhythm the island keeps

None of what I am saying is new. Anyone who has lived on North Uist, South Uist, Barra, Lewis or Harris longer than a season knows about the midges and has arranged their year around them. Peat is cut before the midge comes up in earnest, or late enough that a breeze off the Minch can be relied on. Fencing, roof work, garden work; all of it is done with an eye on the wind gauge as much as on the rain gauge. The islanders’ calendar is not the calendar of a mainland gardener. It is a calendar built around what the weather permits and what the weather actively refuses.

I am, I hope, learning to live inside that calendar rather than beside it. I no longer sulk at a windless evening. I no longer regard a meanbh-chuileag week as a lost week. I regard it as a week the island has scheduled for me, and my job is to look at the schedule, put the camera down, and find the studio door.

There is a stubborn old habit in me, an English mainland habit, that wants to make a day into what I had planned it to be. To bend a working day to my will. This place is, gently and repeatedly, curing me of that. The wind drops and the midge rises and I put down the camera and pick up a brush. I am not defeated. I am rearranged.

The still day, revisited

I want to come back to that stillness at the door.

I hear it differently now. I hear it the way I hope I might, in time, hear all the small changes on this island: not as invitations to my own plans, but as information about what the day is actually asking. A still evening in August is a meanbh-chuileag evening. A hard rattling south-westerly is a shoreline evening, when the spray stings your face and the panorama can wrap you inside the wind. A soft uisge mìn is a lochans evening, when the small waters take the drizzle and give it back as reflection. Each condition asks for a different door.

The teachers, I think, are always the small ones. The tiny fly that decides where you cannot stand. The stone lichen that decides the palette of your carborundum plate. The single feather Eddie brings home from the beach that becomes tomorrows mark making tool. I keep thinking, half-jokingly, that if I ever get around to writing a real ars poetica for this island, it will begin: do what the smallest thing tells you. The moor cannot be argued with. The sea cannot be argued with. And the meanbh-chuileag, blessedly, will not entertain your argument for a second.

Coda: the working week

For anyone keeping an odd sort of count. This week I have not photographed outdoors since last Tuesday. I have painted three panels I almost don’t hate and one I’m really quite cross with, made a small carborundum proof, badly, walked the loch walk six times, the walk Eddie loves so much because he gets to swim in four different places and got a good short set of frames that might not get deleted, and read half a book about Peter Lanyon and some wonderful Sorley Maclean poetry (in English. Sadly the original Gaelic translations which I have, are far beyond me and, I fear, always will be, but they look beautiful nonetheless, as I cast my eye across them) in the evenings while the moor gave up its warm breath and the midges rose. When the gaoth mhìn finally comes back, a soft working wind, not the kind that flattens your hair against your skull, just enough to keep the meanbh-chuileag pinned to the peat, I will be out again. Ready. And oddly rested.

I have not lost the days. The days have simply been given a different shape by a creature the size of a comma.

She is my editor this week. And I have learned, at last, not to argue with her.

On Noticing

Posted on August 1, 2026 by - Abstract Photography, Photographic Expressionism, Photography comment, Photography Ideas

There is a particular quality of light that arrives on Uist in the late afternoon of a clear day in autumn — low, slanting, the colour of weak whisky — that lasts perhaps eleven minutes before it shifts again. If you are inside the house when it comes, you miss it. If you are outside but looking at your phone, you miss it. If you are walking the machair with someone and deep in conversation, you miss it. The light does not announce itself. It does not wait. It simply arrives, holds for a breath, and is gone.

This, I have come to believe, is the whole business of being an artist. Not technique, not gear, not even ideas in the first instance. Noticing.

I talk a great deal to my students about seeing — about learning to see abstractly, to see beyond the obvious subject, to see the shape inside the thing rather than the thing itself. But seeing is the second act. The first is noticing that there is something worth seeing in the first place. And noticing, I am increasingly convinced, is one of the rarest faculties most of us possess and one we so sadly lose.

The faculty we are taught to lose

Children notice everything. A puddle is an event. A beetle on a stone holds them for half an hour. The way frost forms a feather on the inside of a window in winter is, to a child, plainly miraculous, because they have not yet been told it is ordinary (although I am with the children: frost feathers are wondrous things still). Somewhere between five and fifteen we are quietly taught that most things are not worth looking at, that the world has been catalogued already, that to stop and stare is faintly embarrassing. Far better to concentrate on becoming an accountant. Or a Dentist. (And I mean no offence to either profession; I know we need both. It is just so sad that the children who crave a life in art are so often firmly directed elsewhere, with all good intentions, I am sure). And so we walk through our days half-blind, sleepwalking past the small wonders, saving our attention for the screen, the schedule, the next thing.

The painter Joan Eardley, walking the cliffs at Catterline in all weathers, understood this. She would stand in a storm, wearing her workmen’s overalls, with her easel weighted down by stones, lashed by the same sea spray her neighbours were sheltering from, and paint what she saw and felt. The villagers, kindly enough, thought her a little mad, but loved her anyway. She thought them, I suspect, a little asleep. Her work survives — those great heavy paintings of grey sea and grey sky and the small bright clothes of the Samson children — because she was willing to be the only one in the village still looking when everyone else had gone indoors.

To make abstract work that comes from somewhere true rather than somewhere borrowed, we have to undo this gradual closing-down of the eye. We have to become, again, the kind of person who stops on a wet pavement because a slick of oil from a passing car has bloomed into a small Helen Frankenthaler at our feet. The kind of person who notices that the rust on a harbour bollard has the exact ochre of a piece of Antoni Tàpies, and stays there long enough to photograph it badly three times before getting the frame they wanted. The kind of person who sees that the shadow of a fence post on grass in March is not grey but a complicated, restless blue.

What the great noticers had in common

The photographers and artists whose work moves me most are not, on the whole, the ones with the most expensive cameras or the cleverest software. They are the ones who appear to have decided, quietly and without fuss, to pay closer attention than anyone else in the room.

Agnes Martin walked alone in the New Mexico desert for hours at a time, looking at the line of the horizon until she could draw it from the inside. Her grids, which to a casual eye look almost identical, are in fact the residue of a lifetime of looking at very small differences — the difference between one pale band of sky and the pale band beneath it, the difference between this morning and yesterday morning. The work is the noticing made visible.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham went to Switzerland in 1949 and stood inside the Grindelwald glacier. She wrote afterwards of feeling its weight, its interior light, the way the ice held blue and green and white all at once. The drawings and paintings that followed — those marvellous ringed and folded forms — were not invented. They were noticed, and then translated.

Hamish Fulton, who calls himself a walking artist, has made a long career out of essentially one act: walking, and counting that as the work. No sculptures, no installations in the usual sense. Just walks, documented in spare text and the occasional photograph. He has said he is not interested in walking as a means to make art; the walking is the art. What he is really saying, I think, is that the noticing is the art, and the walking is merely the discipline that makes noticing possible.

Closer to my own field, Raymond Moore — that quiet English photographer of edges and margins, of caravan parks and harbour walls and the awkward joins between things — spent his life photographing what no one else thought worth photographing. He once said that the photographs he made were of “things found, not things sought”. The distinction is everything. A thing sought is a thing already imagined. A thing found is a thing that was waiting for someone awake enough to see it.

Or take Saul Leiter, who lived in the same few blocks of New York’s East Village for sixty years and never ran out of pictures. The same streets, the same windows, the same red and yellow umbrellas in the same falling snow. What he had was not novelty of subject but depth of attention. He looked harder than anyone else at the place he happened to be.

There is a thread running through all these artists, and it is not technique. It is patience of the eye.

The Hebridean education

Out here on North Uist, noticing is made easier by emptiness. There is less to distract you. A single skylark over the dunes can hold your attention for the whole of a morning. The Atlantic does not move the way the North Sea moves, and once you have noticed that, you cannot unsee it. The sky changes character three or four times an hour, and after a year of living under it you begin to know its moods the way you know the moods of a person you live with and love.

The Gaelic-speaking poets of these islands understood noticing as a serious discipline, long before any of us came to it through cameras. There is a word in Gaelic, dùthchas, that has no clean English equivalent — it means something like a deep, inherited belonging to a particular place, a knowing of it in the bones. The Uist poet Aonghas MacNeacail and, before him, Sorley MacLean from Raasay, wrote out of that kind of knowing. Their poems are full of small, exact noticings — a particular stone, a particular angle of light on a particular slope, the way the wind comes off a specific stretch of water — that could only have been written by someone who had stood in that place long enough to be quiet inside it.

This is the lesson the island teaches, slowly, to anyone who will listen. That noticing is not a quick flick of the eye. It is a kind of staying. You have to be willing to remain in front of a thing long enough for it to begin to speak. The first thirty seconds tell you almost nothing. The first thirty seconds are mostly your own mind, still chattering, still labelling, still moving on. It is the second minute, and the third, and the fouth hour, and the ninth week, where the thing in front of you begins to come forward and reveal what it actually is.

The Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön talks about staying — staying with discomfort, staying with boredom, staying with whatever is in front of you instead of fleeing into the next thing. I think the artist’s version of staying is exactly this. To remain in front of an ordinary subject long enough for it to stop being ordinary. To outlast your own boredom. To let the world begin to disclose itself.

Noticing without an island

But you do not need an island. You need a willingness. Noticing is, in the end, a small daily act of disobedience. It is refusing the speed the world is asking of you.

It is standing in front of the kitchen sink in the morning and seeing that the water coming from the tap, lit by the window, holds within it every silver Hiroshi Sugimoto ever made. It is walking the same lane you have walked for ten years and finding, today, that the moss on the stone wall is a different green than it was last week, and wondering why. It is sitting in the car park outside the supermarket for a minute longer than you need to, because the puddle by the trolley bay has a sky in it. It is the bus shelter at dusk. The condensation on the windscreen. The way the strip light in the corridor at the dentist makes the carpet look like a Mark Rothko, if Rothko had ever painted carpet.

The Surrealists, for all their theatrical nonsense, were right about one thing: that the marvellous is hiding inside the ordinary, and that most of us walk past it because we have been trained to. André Breton’s idea of le merveilleux quotidien — the everyday marvellous — is a phrase worth keeping. It is not that extraordinary things are happening in extraordinary places. It is that extraordinary things are happening everywhere, all the time, and our job is to be the one person on the street who saw it.

The American poet Mary Oliver, who built an entire body of work out of walking the same New England woods over and over, put it as plainly as anyone ever has. “Attention,” she wrote, “is the beginning of devotion.” Not a bad sentence to keep pinned somewhere in the studio.

Why the camera comes second

There is a danger, of course, in being an artist who works with a camera, which is that the camera can become a substitute for the eye. We can lift it before we have looked. We can begin clicking before we have noticed. We can produce a great quantity of images without ever having paid attention to anything.

This is the difference, I think, between a photograph made by someone who was barely there and a photograph made by someone who stopped, and breathed, and saw. The first kind is everywhere — Instagram is largely a vast warehouse of them. The second kind is rare, and you know it when you encounter it, because it carries something across to you that no amount of technique can fake. There is a person behind it. There is someone who was awake.

This is why I keep returning to the idea that the picture is only ever as deep as the looking that led to it. A photograph made in haste, by an eye that has not paused, will look like exactly that — no matter how perfectly exposed, no matter how cleverly processed. And a photograph made by someone who has noticed, deeply, before lifting the camera, will carry that depth into the print. Other people will feel it even if they cannot say why.

Robert Adams, the great American landscape photographer, wrote that “form is beauty made visible”. I would add to that, very gently, that form is also noticing made visible. The form of a good photograph is the trace of an act of attention. You can read the quality of the looking in the bones of the picture.

So, as we walk out, slow down and find ourselves captivated by something the world is hurrying by, it is not because we are odd or somehow special; it is because we have remembered something old. That the world is, and always has been, quietly extraordinary. That most people are not looking. And that the small, stubborn act of looking anyway — of being the one who notices the eleven minutes of whisky-coloured light, the oil slick on the pavement, the moss that has changed colour since last week — is, perhaps, one of the most important things we do as artists.

Everything else, in the end, is only the work of carrying that noticing across to someone else.

Companions in the Studio

Posted on August 1, 2026 by - Abstract Photography, Photographic Expressionism, Photography comment, Photography Ideas

It is the fourth of July, and I could be forgiven for thinking it was the fourth of March. The rain is coming in sideways across the machair, the wind is up, and the Atlantic is doing that low grumbling thing it does when it wants you to know it is still in charge. Eddie is asleep in his basket, curled into himself the way only a dog can, oblivious to the weather and to the small crisis brewing in his human – namely, that I am on my third mug of tea and will shortly have to make the dash across the yard to the cottage. The joys of a Studio Bothy without plumbing.

But I am happy. Deeply, quietly, undramatically happy. There is paint on my hands. There is a canvas on the easel that is starting, finally, to say something back to me. And on the Bluetooth speaker, Bob Dylan is working his way through a playlist I have curated over years – every song one I love, no filler, no polite inclusions. Visions of Johanna. Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again. Tangled Up In Blue. Positively Fourth Street. Old Bob, rasping and gnomic and full of the weather of his own long life.

I know Bob is not everyone’s cup of tea. And I know that, for some of you, music while working is unthinkable – an intrusion, a small tyranny, a set of borrowed emotions crowding out your own. I understand that. I have friends who need silence the way I need Dylan, and their reasons are as good as mine. But it set me thinking, this rain-lashed afternoon, about the rooms we build around our making. The company we keep, or refuse to keep, while the work is happening. And I thought it might be worth spending a post on it.

What music does, when it works

For me, music at the easel or the desk is not background. It is a kind of second weather in the room. It sets a tempo my hand can lean into or push against. Certain records make me looser – Radiohead, The Housemartins, I Am Kloot, The Lathums anything that lopes rather than marches. Others sharpen me – J.S. Bach on a good day, all that architecture, that faith, that structure is a form of freedom. Dylan is somewhere else entirely: he is company. A voice in the room that is not asking anything of me, but is also not pretending I am alone.

There is something in the way music occupies the front of the mind that lets the back of the mind get on with its real work. The critical, editing, second-guessing part of me – the part that ruins more paintings than any lack of skill ever has – is kept busy following a lyric, tracking a chord change, mouthing a line I know by heart. Meanwhile, the hand moves. The eye chooses. The picture makes itself, more or less, while I am usefully distracted from interfering with it.

I suspect this is why so many artists work to music, and why so many others cannot. Some of us need the front of the mind occupied so the rest can breathe. Others find that any voice at all – even a wordless one – colonises the whole room and leaves no space for their own thinking.

What silence does, when it works

I have known silence too. There are days when I put the speaker away and let the studio fill with the sound of the wind under the eaves, the rain on the roof, Eddie schnuffling in his basket as he dreams of chasing rabbits. On those days, whatever I am painting seems to need its own quiet to find itself. Music would be a hand on the shoulder when what is wanted is to be left alone.

Silence, in the Japanese aesthetic sense of Ma – the pregnant pause, the meaningful gap – is not absence. It is the room the work needs in order to speak. There are pictures I could not have made with Dylan in the corner, however much I love him. They needed the North Uist weather as their only soundtrack.

So neither music nor silence is the answer. They are different tools for different work, and part of learning our craft is learning which we need on which day, and having the discipline to reach for the right one.

The room itself

But music and silence are only the surface of it. Underneath is the deeper question of the space we make for our making.

Not everyone has a studio. Most of you, I know, do not. You have a corner of the kitchen table, a spare bedroom shared with the ironing board, a shed you have carved a working patch out of, a laptop on the sofa while the household eddies around you. When I lived at Worksop, my working space was a single small bedroom that also had to be my office. It was cramped and frustrating and, more often than I like to admit, defeating. I would set up, work for an hour, tidy everything away so I could reach the computer, set it up again the next day. The friction of it wore me down. Some days I did not paint at all because I could not face the choreography.

And yet. Work came out of that room. Not as much as I would have made with more space, and not as freely, but work nonetheless. Looking back, I think the room taught me things I would not have learned in a large studio. It taught me economy. It taught me to plan. It taught me that the space we work in is not primarily a physical thing but a mental one – a decision, renewed daily, that this is where the making happens, however small this may be.

That is why, standing now in my Studio Bothy with its whitewashed walls and its view of Loch Sandarraigh and its dreaming dog snoring gently in the corner, I try never to take it for granted. I know what its absence feels like. I know the small daily grief of not having a place to leave a wet canvas standing overnight.

Optimising what you have

If you are working in a small space, a few things I have learned, for what they are worth.

Claim it, even if it is only a corner. Put something on the wall that says this is my working place. A postcard. A print. A photograph of a painting you love. Territory is a psychological matter as much as a physical one, and the eye needs to know where the border is.

Reduce the friction between deciding to work and being able to work. That gap is where most of us lose the day. If you have to unpack a box, clear a table, and hunt for your brushes every time, you will find fewer and fewer reasons to start. Whatever you can leave out, leave out. Whatever you can pre-load, pre-load. Give tomorrow’s self the smallest possible excuse.

Protect the light. A small space with good light beats a big space with bad light every time. If you can position yourself near a window, do. If you cannot, buy a decent daylight-balanced bulb. Your eyes are your primary tool. Feed them.

Ritualise the beginning. Make a small ceremony of starting. Boil the kettle. Put the record on, or don’t. Light a candle. Whatever it is, let it be the signal to the rest of your mind that we are here now, and this is what we are doing.

And forgive the compromises. You are not failing because your studio is a corner of the spare room. Giorgio Morandi worked from his bedroom in Bologna for most of his life, painting the same handful of bottles and jars until they became a whole cosmology. Space does not make the artist. The artist makes the space.

What the studio really is

The studio, in the end, is not the room. It is the state of mind we enter when we cross into it. The Bothy is only the outward form of an inward decision: that today, for these hours, I am going to make something. Everything else – the tea, the dog, the wind, the Dylan, or the silence – is scaffolding around that decision.

Some of us build the scaffolding with music. Some with silence. Some with a particular chair, a particular smell of turps, a particular hour of the day. What matters is that we know what our own scaffolding is, that we honour it, and that we do not apologise for needing what we need.

Because the work asks a great deal of us. It asks us to sit down, day after day, and be honest about what we see and what we feel, and to translate that honestly into marks and colours and shapes. That is not a small thing. It deserves the room we can give it, however small that room may be.

The rain is still coming in sideways. Eddie has not moved. Bob is on to Shelter from the Storm, which seems appropriate. And I must, at last, make the dash across the yard.

Failure, False Starts and the Bin

Posted on June 19, 2026 by - Abstract Photography, Photographic Expressionism, Photography Ideas

There is a folder on my hard drive that I have never shown anyone. It is called, plainly, the bin. Inside it are several hundred photographs that did not, in the end, become anything. Some are nearly good. Many are beyond embarrassing. A few are pictures I was, for a season, quite sure of.

They have all ended up in the same place.

This week I want to talk about that folder. About why I think it might be the most useful place on my hard drive, even though nothing in it ever gets used. And about why the discipline of putting work into it is, for me, the single biggest thing that separates the pictures I am proud of from the much larger pile I am not.

This is, in other words, a post about editing. Which is a word I think we should use more often, and a practice I think we should be much less afraid of.

The word that gets in the way

But first, let me say something about the word failure, because I have come around to thinking it does more damage in studios than almost any other word in our creative vocabulary.

The trouble with failure is that it carries a verdict. It is the language of exams and final judgements. It is a word of bad parents. It closes the door. The trouble for us is that the door is almost never actually closed. The picture that did not work this month is, very often, the picture that teaches us how to make next month’s picture work. To call it a failure is to put a full stop where the work, at most, wants a comma.

So I have replaced the word in my own studio. It has gone into a ‘studio swear jar’. The pictures I would once have called failures are, instead, unfinished. Or they are teachers. Or, most honestly, they are the work that did not yet know what it wanted to be. The artist who can say that to themselves, without flinching, is the artist who can keep going. The artist who keeps using failure about their own work is the artist who, sooner or later, stops.

I am suspicious, by the way, of anyone who tells me their pictures never fail. They are either lying, or they are not pushing hard enough. The two often go together.

Three folders

Here is the practical bit, the bit this all hinges on.

I keep three folders on my hard drive. They are real, named, and the act of moving a picture from one to another is a small ceremony I take seriously. (I have a little imaginary fanfare that plays in my head each time we enact it). The folders are called keepers, teachers and bin. (I also have a little note on my studio wall to remind me of this principle).

The keepers are the small number of pictures that survive the ‘long looking’. They go on the wall, into the small book, into the talk. There are fewer of them than you would think. Far fewer than I would like, really, but’s that’s life. A good year might give me fifteen. Most years maybe twelve. The number is not the point. The fact that they have earned their place is.

The teachers are the pictures that did not make it onto the wall but that I cannot quite throw away because they have something to tell me. They might be nearly there. They might have given me an idea I have not yet finished pursuing. The teachers folder is private. I do not show it. Every few months I revisit it and ask: is this still teaching me something, or is it now ready to go to the bin? Many of them, in time, are.

The bin, finally, is for the work that has done its job. Not failures, in the old sense, but work that has finished what it had to say to me. The pictures in the bin are not destroyed. I am not that kind of artist. They are simply withdrawn from circulation. They are no longer asking anything of me, and I am no longer asking anything of them. We have parted on friendly terms.

If you take only one thing from this post, let it be this: make the three folders. Today. Name them clearly. The act of naming is the start of the discipline. You might even play a little fanfare.

Why we resist

I’ll be honest about something, because I think it is the thing few artists quite says out loud.

Editing is hard not because we cannot see what is weak in our own work. Most of the time, we can. We know which picture is just keeping its friends company. We know which picture is being kept because of the morning that produced it, rather than the picture itself. We know. (we DO know, don’t we, deep down).

Editing is hard because the act of cutting a picture is the act of putting ourselves on the line. The picture we keep is the picture we are now claiming. The argument for it is ours. The responsibility for it is ours. The failure of it, if it fails, is ours.

Hoarding has no edge. As long as everything is kept, nothing has been chosen. As long as nothing has been chosen, nothing can be wrong. Hoarding feels safer. It is not. It is the place where bodies of work go to die quietly under their own weight.

The day you start editing honestly is the day you start being accountable to your own eye. That is uncomfortable. It is also what the practice is for.

The four temptations

There are, in my experience, four temptations that keep weak work alive in our archives long after they should have been let go. Naming them helps.

The first is the picture that took effort. The early start. The long drive. The cold hands, the rain in the lens. These pictures earn an emotional surcharge in our eye that has nothing to do with how strong they actually are. We keep them because of what they cost. The viewer does not care what they cost. The viewer cares whether the picture works.

The second is the picture that nearly worked. This is the most dangerous of the four. The picture that, with another layer, or a slightly different crop, or a small intervention in Lightroom or Photoshop, might be the one. Nearly is not a finished position. It is a state of suspension, and suspended pictures sit in the teachers folder for years, eating attention. The discipline is to take the nearly-pictures, learn what they have to teach, and let them go. The next picture, made on the back of that learning, is usually the one that resolves. Not the nearly itself.

The third is the picture someone else liked. A friend stopped at it. A workshop tutor mentioned it. Someone on Instagram said something kind. The picture has been blessed externally, and it now sits in your archive with a small halo it did not earn. The body of work cannot be edited by other people’s votes. It can only be edited by your own clear eye, applied without an audience in the room.

The fourth is the picture from the rare opportunity. The trip you will not make again. The light that lasted six minutes. The conditions made the picture feel important. They do not make the picture good. Keep the memory. Let the picture go if the picture is not strong. The work owes nothing to the trip. The trip was for you.

I am still keeping pictures, I am quite sure, (ok, ok, I KNOW I am) that one or another of these temptations has been quietly preserving. The work is never finished. The discipline is simply that the questions keep being asked.

Wait before you edit

There is one principle I have come, over many years, to trust more than any other.

Never edit a session on the day you shot it. Never edit a project in the month you finished it.

New work is too warm to handle with any kind of clear head or shrewd eye. The picture you made yesterday is still glowing with the morning that produced it. You will see the morning, not the picture.

So wait. Two weeks for a session. Three months for a project. A year, if you can bear it, for a long body of work. When you come back, the weather of the making has lifted off the work. What is left is what is actually there.

The waiting is not procrastination. While the work is cooling, you do other things. You look at other artists. You make new pictures that have nothing to do with the project resting in the drawer. You read. You walk. The rest is what allows you to come back as someone slightly different from the person who made the work. That is the point. You are not the same photographer three months later. The one who returns to the work is the one who can edit it. The one who made it cannot.

The pictures I edited too quickly, in the heat of having just shot them, are the ones I most often had to re-edit a year later and was embarrassed by. The ones I quietly took down from my website (and still occasionally do when I fail to heed my own lessons). The pictures I let cool are the ones I have rarely had to revisit. Patience is not a virtue here. It is a method.

Three passes, days apart

When the cooling is done, the editing happens in three passes. On different days. I have tried doing all three in a single sitting and it does not work. The eye tires. The judgement softens. By the end you are keeping things because the morning is over.

Pass one is the body pass. Move quickly. Do not think. Look at every picture for two or three seconds and star the ones that pull the eye, without explanation. The body knows what it likes. The mind will get its turn later. This pass should feel almost thrilling. There is a permission in it.

Pass two is the eye pass. A week later. Lay the starred pictures out as small thumbnails. Look for the family. Which pictures belong to which? Which ones are the central figures? Which ones, on closer look, do not belong in the project at all and want to go somewhere else? This is the pass in which the body of work begins to declare itself.

Pass three is the cruel pass. A month later, if you can stand the wait. Half of what survived pass two will now look thin. Cut it. The picture has had its month to argue with you, and it has not won. 

The body of work that survives the third pass is almost always smaller than you thought it would be. It is almost always better than you thought it would be. The two facts are related.

Print them small

A practical note that I think matters more than people realise.

Edit on small prints. A5 at most. A6 if you can. Cheap paper, cheap ink, no fuss. Pin them to a board and live with them for a week.

The small print is honest in a way the large print is not. It has nowhere to hide. It cannot dazzle you with scale or detail. It either holds together as a picture, or it falls apart. The pictures that hold together at A6 will hold together at any size you eventually print them. The pictures that need to be big to convince you are pictures that are using size to cover for something missing.

I have a board in the studio that is rarely empty. Whatever project is being edited goes up on it. The prints stay for a week. I walk past them in the morning on the way to the kettle. I look at them in the evening when the light has changed. The pictures that survive a week on the board are the pictures that have something in them. The pictures that begin to embarrass me by Wednesday come down on Thursday.

I know this is less convenient than scrolling through thumbnails on a screen. That is part of the point. The friction is doing useful work. The screen is too forgiving. It is too ‘spangly’. The screen flatters far more than it ought. The wall is impartial.

The seven questions

When I stand in front of the board, these are the questions I find myself asking, in roughly this order.

  1. Would I miss this picture if it were gone?
  2. Does it earn its place, or is it just keeping a friend company?
  3. Am I keeping it for the photograph, or for the memory of the day?
  4. Would I show this in a small book, beside the others I am sure of?
  5. Does it say something the others already say, only less well?
  6. If a stranger saw it cold, would they pause?
  7. Is it true, or is it merely clever?

The seventh question is the one I find I am still asking, twenty years or more into this. Cleverness is the most common cause of survival in an archive that is otherwise honest. A clever picture is one that has been admired, including by oneself, for its trick. The trick wears off. What is left, if anything is left, is what one truly wants to look at.

Edit toward what you truly want to look at. Cut the cleverness. The body of work will thank you for it.

What false starts are for

I want to tell a short, particular story before I finish, because I think it is the most useful thing I can tell you about this whole subject.

A few winters ago I spent the best part of three months trying to make a project about the coast of North Norfolk, a place I love. I had the idea on a still November afternoon, walking back along a shingle beach in a low light, and I thought: there is a body of work here. I will photograph the beaches and salt marshes through the winter. By spring I will have a project.

The project did not work. I went out three times a week, in all weathers, as we stayed in a cottage there. I made hundreds of frames. Probably thousands. I tried ICM. I tried multiple exposure. By February I knew the project had failed. The pictures were dutiful. They photographed the salt marshes and big skies of Norfolk the way a stranger would photograph them. I had known it long before I had admitted it.

But here is what took me longer to see. Buried inside that winter’s work, when I finally came to look at it honestly, was a folder of frames I had taken almost as off-cuts. The surface of the water under wind. The way the light moved when I was not paying attention. A detritus around a fisherman’s hut. The small disobedience of a pool that refused to sit still for the camera. Eighteen months later, those off-cuts became a body of work I still believe in.

The subject I thought I was photographing was a landscape. The subject I was actually photographing was movement, and refusal, and the small quarrel between light and water. That was the project. The marshes were the place where the project lived. And the false start was how I found it.

This has happened to me more than once. The project you set out to make is, very often, the wrong shape. But buried inside the wrong shape, almost always, is the right one. The discipline is not to make the right project first time. The discipline is to go through with the wrong one with enough seriousness that the right one has a chance to emerge from inside it.

So when you start a project that does not seem to be coming together, before you write it off, look at the edges. Look at the corners of the frames. Look at the pictures you keep coming back to that do not quite fit the brief in your head. The next project is almost always hiding there. Not in the centre. At the edges, where you were not paying attention. Where your eye was paying attention without you.

A studio practice for the week ahead

Here is something you can take into your studio tomorrow.

Make the three folders. Today, before anything else. Name them. Move three pictures into each of them, just to break the seal.

Choose one body of work you thought was finished. A project you have not looked at for at least three months. Sit it down again. Lay it out as small thumbnails. Print a few small, on cheap paper. Pin them to a board.

Run the three passes, days apart. Body, eye, cruel. Star, sort, cut. Be honest. Be slow. Do not edit on a bright morning if you can help it.

Print the survivors small. Live with them for a week. Walk past them. Look at them when you are tired.

And keep a small notebook beside the work. Three sentences after each pass. What did I cut, and why? What did I almost cut, and why did I save it? What am I afraid to cut? The third question is the most important. The pictures we are afraid to cut are very often the pictures that most need cutting. The fear is a signal. Listen for it.

And one last thing

The pictures in the bin are not lost. They live on inside the pictures on the wall, in the form of the rigour that made the wall possible. Every frame that did not make it has helped the frames that did. Nothing is wasted. The body of work you can stand behind is built from the small ruthlessness of all the times you let something go.

This is the part I would most like you to take with you. The bin is not the opposite of the body of work. The bin is part of how the body of work is made. The false start is not a failure. It is the route by which the real work arrives.

Be kind to the bin. Be honest with the teachers. Be ruthless, but not cruel, with the keepers.

And the next time you sit down to edit, wait for a grey morning. Make a pot of tea. Have a plate of your favourite biscuits. Take the work that is in the way of the work, and let it go.

The picture you most want to be making is on the other side of that cut.