Singing the world into existence.

Introducing a new series: Songlines. 

By some remarkable coincidences things just seemed to fall into place on Friday. Reading, conversations, seeing and photography combining to create new thinking and a new series that I suspect I will be pursuing for a long period of time. 

The first element was seeing. While wandering through my local beech woods, and looking (vaguely) for something that will progress onwards from my Mametz Wood series, I started to notice something new to me. There were strange patterns, shapes and forms in those trees that could if we recognise them as such be called simply ’art’. What struck me was that it needed a person to not only see that art, but to recognise it as such. In short, there's art out there and it's growing on trees! 

The second element was reading ColinPantall's blog about Robert Macfarlane’s new book ’Landmarks' and how important the naming of things can be to the recognition of their existence. He used the example of the ’Missing Buildings’ project by Thom and Beth Atkinson. Those missing building are all around us, but it's only in their naming that they become significant. To quote Colin “Experience leads to language and language leads to seeing. And seeing leads to photography.” And I still needed a name for the tree art I'd discovered. 

The third and final element was a Twitter conversation with John MacPherson about my Songs of Travel series. He asked if the title came from Bruce Chatwin’s book Songlines. I responded, without realising the significance at the time, that it, in fact, came from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. And thought nothing more of it, for a while... 

It was a couple of hours later that I realised that there was a name for this tree art, one that was already in existence and that the Songlines that John had spoken of would be perfect. Naming equals significance. 

Songlines are a creation myth held by the indigenous peoples of Australia that, to quote Bruce Chatwin “...tell of the legendary totemic being who wandered over the continent in the Dreamtime, singing out the name of everything that crossed their path - birds, animals, plants, rocks, waterholes - and so singing the world into existence." 

“In some cases, the paths of the creator-beings are said to be evident from their marks, or petrosomatoglyphs, on the land, such as large depressions in the land which are said to be their footprints.” Wikipedia. 

I can't claim to share such animist beliefs, but I do feel a close affinity with trees and forests. Indeed, I wrote a poem a few years ago with the simple line “Tall trees temple” attempting to express that feeling of otherworldliness we sometimes get from being in the forest, the analogy being with a similar feeling we might experience in a church. The belief I can happily share is the need to ’sing the world into existence’ or that naming things gives them a power and maybe an existence they could not possess unnamed. 

The images are presented as negatives. As any film photographer will know the negative image can have a beauty and otherworldliness all of their own. And to me that encapsulates what I'm seeing, the otherness and the requirement for us to see in new ways. To recognise art when it's before us. What a wonderful world!

Landscape photography books of 2014, a personal selection: Scattered Waters by Thomas Joshua Cooper.

The following are in no particular order of preference, but might be in the order they fell through my letterbox.

Scattered Waters, Thomas Joshua Cooper. Published by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. 96 pages, hardback, RRP £30.

Here's a photography book for photographers, it speaks the language of photography quietly and elegantly. It's a remarkably unshowy, contemplative work, which, while not exactly referencing other photographers manages to speak in their tongue, in tone, rhythm and in the pure joy of the surface of the silver print. Okay, it's a book, so they aren't silver prints at all, but it seems to retain many of their qualities.

There's nothing clever or original about the concept - following rivers from source to sea - yet it would be a lesser book without it; it is the gel that binds it together much like the binding of the spine. Perhaps it's a little stale, safe, comfortable? He doesn't attempt to redefine the language of photography, but to utilise it as poetry. There are worse sins. And maybe, just maybe it’s better for avoiding such ’youthful’ concerns.

The question I'd ask is how many others can pull this off so successfully? I fear my reply might be few if they allow themselves to be defined by their tools rather than expressing themselves through them. This is the complacency of photography today, which Cooper does much to promote in his controlled public image. It seems odd for a professor of photography to have so little to actually say, at least in public. The emphasis on analogue tradition seems designed to appeal to ’photo world’, while saying nothing about creativity itself.

Having said that, the pictures do speak of more; there are so many distinct representations of the forms of the water as it evolves along its journey. A visual hymn to the river, with a visual integrity many of us would do well to follow. Its apparent simplicity is also, perhaps, its poetry. That musicality of the hymn is mirrored in the rhythms, the gentle tonality and the wash of the waves. Because if there’s a secondary, underlying concept, it is a visual mimicry of the sounds of the river. It's that which raises it up above so many wannabes. As ever, it is ideas and their expression which breathe new life into old language.

New directions: Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen.

Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen is my new long term project. If you don't know the area it's the valley immediately below the peaks of the Brecon Beacons above the Neuadd Reservoirs. After the tight, claustrophobic confines of ’Mametz Wood’ it feels vast and empty, it is a wind-blasted wilderness and I'm finding freedom there.

It's an area I know well; I visited it frequently many years ago for what was probably my first ’proper’ series, the Islands Project. This, though, will be different.

I learnt many things from Mametz, not least the limitations of social media - how dare I share art that's dark, difficult and metaphorical. Art has no more reason to be uplifting and cheerful than TV should always be Downton Abbey.

So I'm thinking yet again of changing my relationship with social media; people there, for the most part, don't want to be challenged, it's leisure time and they'd prefer cat videos thank you very much. I'm not yet sure how this will pan out, but you can expect more posts to be in the form of blogs and less of them.

The second, and perhaps more pertinent thing, I learned from Mametz was the value of photographing a small area, repeatedly over a long period of time. It's not exactly the first time I've approached my work like that, but it was perhaps the first time it really sank in -just how valuable it is to an artist.

Also, if we listen to the advice of Mike Jackson

 and Chris Tancock who are in my humble estimation both producing ground breaking work in landscape photography (if you'll forgive the pun), then long term devotion to a place is the way forward for the more serious landscape artist.

I'm disinterested in the ’low hanging fruit’ of new locations that barely scratch the surface. They tell me nothing about the place, the photographer or the way we interact with our surroundings.

If we stop to think about how many (perhaps the majority) of us first became interested in landscape photography - by recording the places we've visited or hiked past - then perhaps it's unsurprising that so few stop to question this approach. It feels entirely natural, organic and of course easy.

Yet what if there was a way to not only improve the depth and originality of our photography, but also find it more satisfying? For that to happen we have to question our assumptions and ourselves. It won't be found on the ’well trodden path’. Art has the potential to tell us something about ourselves, those tiny insights can be a great nourishment to the mind, something no end of pretty sunsets can ever hope to accomplish.

Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen is (for now at least) conceptually free. That's a major challenge to someone who's worked for many years within the bountiful confines of conceptual ideas. I'm going there without preconceptions, ideas or external motivations, but to explore through the artistic space of not knowing. Of course, you'd be right to say that is, in itself a concept! It's something I feel I need after 13 months of exploring the psychological trauma of war and it is something I need to do for the furtherance of myself as a landscape artist.

The artist and writer Emma Coker in Tactics for Not knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected (2013), wrote

‘Artistic practice recognises the practice of not knowing, less as the preliminary state (of ignorance) preceding knowledge, but as a field of desirable indeterminacy within which to work. Not knowing is an active space within practice, wherein an artist hopes for an encounter with something new or unfamiliar, unrecognisable or unknown’.

(Emma Bolland has written a great piece on this.)

One of the difficulties with finding that “field of desirable indeterminacy” is breaking down the barriers of received perception. Breaking out of the way of seeing and expressing ourselves through what we've seen, made or been told previously. The feeling freedom of that vast area is one of the hindrances; it's so easy to stride purposefully onwards ignoring the detail of what is there. Repeated visits are the key here, to break that mindset, to get the clichés, assumptions and received wisdoms out of my head.

I've been visiting the area now for about a month, and haven't shared any images because they felt stale, uninspiring and from someone other than myself. Finally I feel I'm starting to find that space where I can start to think afresh, and more critically see afresh.

I've been delving deeply into the art of not knowing and there is light at the end of the tunnel - just barely glimpsed. I've no idea how this will progress (which I should think of as a good thing) it may falter at this one image, it may take a wholly divergent path or I may find images to complement this one. The one thing I do know is that after a month I've barely scratched the surface. So for now, here is my first image from Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen.

Meditative landscape photography: a counterblast.

I'm growing tired and some may say cynical about the growth of comment about finding some form of artistic transcendence through landscape photography. At its best it seems to be a sort of art as therapy (which isn't a bad thing of course, simply partial); at worst it panders to the amateurish idea that landscape photography is intrinsically bound up with an escape from everyday realities. Hucksters selling the ’living the dream’ notion to those poor souls stuck in offices. 

The reality of creativity is somewhat different of course, there's actually a lot of hard physical and mental labour involved; there's research, self examination and self critique. Much of which has little to do with being ’in the moment’ and much of which is as unromantic as any other aspect of daily life that consumes us. 

I also wish to posit the idea that such attitudes tend to result in a self fulfilling artistic prophesy. If we’re looking for transcendence, or a meditative state of mind, where we’re at peace then the results will represent that desire more than any intrinsic truths or clear eyed explorations of the landscape. 

Sure, we need clarity of vision and the ability to focus creatively, but I'll let you into a secret, for me that can be achieved through hard work. Finding those cracks in our vision that takes us somewhere new doesn't have to be about ’being in the moment’ we can achieve it through questioning, concentrating and thinking while; and both before and after we are actually making images. 

The truth is creativity happens as a result of a ’conversation’ between the conscious and subconscious minds (or however we wish to characterise them) it’s a two way process. We need to feed the conscious mind to stimulate the subconscious. 

To be truly creative we must find pleasure in creativity itself, not hoping that external elements will lead us down some hoped for path. The path itself is the subject we should be focussing on. Where it leads us should not be confined by such narrow boundaries, romantic notions and self indulgence. 

Mametz Wood.

’So many men, so beautiful.’

David Jones described the rationale for the title ’In Parenthesis’, his long, modernist poem about the First World War, as ’being in the space between’. In many ways I want my photographs to inhabit that same space; the space between day and night, the space between life and death, the space between sanity and madness, the space between sleep and awake. Most of all the space between love and loss. 

They aren't about war - or this particular battle of Mametz Wood - but the imagined effects of war upon the mind. When our subjectivity is overtaken by a darkness so all encompassingly, unimaginably dreadful that our very vision of the world becomes skewed. 

Mametz Wood

Beginnings. 

I started work on this with some very vague ideas indeed. I went to one of my favourite woods with the idea of looking for some equivalent of abstract expressionist composition on the forest floor. That is the more complex, gestural forms of Pollack for example not the simple forms of Rothko. The environment is quite sufficiently complex to say the least! So I came home with a range of images of leaves, tree stumps, grasses and bushes. It wasn't until I began to process them that I realised they reminded me of some previous work I produced for Owen Sheers’ Skirrid Hill poem Mametz Wood. In this he describes the shock of seeing, in a newly discovered grave, skulls, their jaws ajar as if they'd just breathed their last breath. 

"As if the notes they had sung have only now, 
with this unearthing, 
slipped from their absent tongues."

Mametz Wood, Skirrid Hill.

In this picture I re-imagined that event as both the last breath - the last song as Sheers put it - and the last, dying vision of the soldier as his sight began to fade and his hold on life slipped away. His eyes slipping to the last light of the horizon. 
Realisation. 

Of course it wouldn't be long before I tried experimenting with double exposures - combining these images - and I was astonished that the combined results could create a whole new reality. Simply putting two well chosen images together completely changed the feeling and emphasis of the images. The bodies of men emerged from twigs when combined with grasses, a snake like stump became enraged and explosive when combined with another clump of grass. There emerged a dreamlike magic realism, combined with the nightmare like distorted figures, that reminded me in some ways of a picture that has long occupied my subconscious; Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. 

Mametz Wood 2

Conclusions.  

In my new Mametz Wood series the pictures are half caught visions in the half light, memories, nightmares and the twisted trees intermingling and playing off one another to deceive an exhausted mind. 

The pictures aren’t taken at Mametz Wood itself, they are an imagination, an idea, an illustration. I have no desire to document a place and I have no personal connection with the place to draw me there. Just the same way as a writer has no need to be in a place to describe it, photographers have no need to be in a place to describe an idea about it. Mike Jackson creates whole new worlds in a fish tank, so I don't feel I'm taking a liberty by creating them in another woodland. There's also a sort of unity, taking them in a Welsh wood when so many Welshmen died at Mametz. 

I've long said that landscape photography is capable of far more than illustration, but here I want to show that it can be as creative and imaginative as any other form of art, that we can imagine small worlds from within the landscape and that we can take ideas and make them new by expressing them in a visual form. 

Commemoration.

As I'm sure you are all aware there are plans next year for a national commemoration of the outbreak of the First World War. There's been much debate around this particularly from those who accuse the government of being too celebratory in its approach. I tend to agree with that argument, but I disagree with the way the debate has split between those who wish to concentrate on why the war started and those who say we should concentrate on the personal stories. I have no problem with personal stories, I do have a problem with the concentration of them being on heroism. There are plans to lay stones in the towns where Victoria Cross awardees were born, for example. I don't doubt that there was heroism, but feel I must assert that the common experience of war and this war in particular was not one of jingoistic pride, but of terror, misery and loss. If in some way I can begin to redress that balance and allow even a tiny insight into the genuine experience of the horrors and madness of war, then I will allow myself a small measure of satisfaction. 

Mametz Wood 3

The trouble with bluebells.

By Rob Hudson.



“Come we to the summer, to the summer we will come,
 

For the woods are full of bluebells and the hedges full of bloom” John Clare.

John Clare reminds us that bluebells are one of those natural signs that summer is truly upon us; one of those reminders that the natural world gives us that the world is still turning and the seasons do actually change, even after what seemed to have been a never ending winter.

When I think back to my childhood, it's with a mixture of awe and horror that we thought nothing of filling a jar with bluebells. They grew in such profusion in the woods near our house that the thought never occurred to us that they might be endangered, becoming a rarity. We were both more innocent and naive back in the Seventies, if it's this that those who yearn for halcyon days of the past then I suspect we might be better off, if sadder in our modern knowledge and sophistication.

It was always a jar of bluebells though, I suppose vases weren't common amongst the lower middle class back then - or they certainly weren't amongst our slightly bohemian household - but there was something truly celebratory about filling a jar, about containing those bright stalks that contained the fuse of thrusting green life and the mop head of bluish-purple flowers atop, with a scent that spoke of the vibrancy of life.



And yet bluebells are in danger, both from climate change and from invasive alien or interbreeding varieties. Not to mention that they are now a protected species and it is illegal to pick them.  We should treasure them all the more so now for their precious fragility, although I will miss the ideal of a circular rebirth that is never ending, safe and secure in my halcyon days.



Even to my own eyes (as unscientific as my observations may be) the past few years have seen a disappointing crop of bluebells in the woods up on the hill, above the northern outskirts of the city. Whether this is simply a facet of short-term climactic variations or is likely to become a regular feature of the future, it is possibly too early to say, but one shouldn't easily dismiss the evidence before our eyes.

I sometimes wonder if the sheer pressure of visitors up there also does damage; I imagine most landscape photographers treat bluebells with a certain amount of reverence, but please god, don't ever let me catch one of you up there, treading on them in search of the perfect shot. I can assure you my language wouldn't be pretty!


Bluebells you see have become one of the “seasons” of landscape photography and one of those photographic challenges that it seems all need to set themselves. It's not hard to appreciate why anyone would want to photograph what is undeniably one of the great glories of the British countryside - drifts of blue stretching as far as the eye can see, almost mimicking the sky at times, making me feel a little bit dizzy with joy and upside-down perception. In many woods they are set-off by bright beech leaves, newly emerged and fizzing with green life. Who would not want to go and see that, to celebrate it in camera and create something to treasure on your walls for years to come?

It might surprise you to say that I'm not going to criticise that activity, it's no doubt rather less damaging than picking them as I did I my childish naïveté, it gets people out doors, to engaged with the rejuvenating effects of the natural world and experiencing the joy of photography.



Okay, I won't criticise it except to say (quell surprise!) that bluebell photos do have a massive tendency to look pretty much the same, baring a few variations, unlike almost any other sub genre of landscape photography. One has to wonder what has happened to create this disjoint between creativity and landscape photography? Perhaps it is (to paraphrase David Ward) the idea that a camera is simply a mechanical box that can't hope to achieve anything more than record what is in front of the lens? Yet, in the right hands a camera can be used to express narrative, parable, metaphor and therefore, something of what is inside us, something unique and personal. Although we have created the perfect tool for illustration in the camera, it is capable of far more than simply recording.

And it's not just bluebells; autumn, snow, ice, heather-flowers, whatever. Yes they are beautiful, yes they can be transformative, but they are just subjects and we need to see beyond the subject to the point where we are looking to interweave those natural elements into our narrative, to see through the lens of metaphor and illustrate our emotional response and our place within this world. Such seasonal changes after all serve to remind us of our place within the world, of our relationship with nature and the passing of time.

If we think of a simple definition of creativity as  “creating something original which has value”, then pretty much every photograph of bluebells I've seen fall down by that measure; although I'm sure they have value to their creator, on originality they are sadly lacking.  The problem is essentially that we go out to photograph bluebells themselves without giving a second thought to any wider ideas.

It's not so hard to see that if we are dealing in pictures then, because it is within a frame we can allude to something more. A frame and a still image give us opportunities to weave elements within the picture to have meaning (and value) above what is explicitly there.

We need to think beyond the literal. If I were to explain it in terms of the written word, perhaps it would become clearer where creativity lies. A literal description might go something like this “blue flowers for as far as the eye can see”; where as a more poetic and creative version may say “drifts of wild blue wave tossed mist, creating horizons of the mind”. You get the “drift”!



Words are no different to visual elements within the photographic frame, in many ways it’s the way we arrange them that lends them meaning, potency and gravity. Yes it's difficult to achieve by simply pointing the camera in a certain direction or at a certain angle, or with a certain light, but it's not impossible. And the satisfaction to be gained from creating something that is unique, personal and meaningful to us should never be underestimated. It is one of life’s great joys and is one way to find again our halcyon days.