A guilty pleasure?

I'm referring to showing my images in person to someone else – the prospect of which always makes me feel very nervous indeed. Yet, something still makes me go through the trauma of showing my photographs. Perhaps something about the process gives me pleasure? Am I just revelling in showing off, feeding my ego? I don't think so; it's a bittersweet experience for me, a mixture of anxiety and a hint of gratification. Of course it's the gratification that makes me feel guilty...

On the face of it, surely I should have nothing to worry about when sharing my images. I've been making photographs for close on 30 years, my images have been published in over 20 books and a number of magazines and I've achieved some recognition from my peers for the quality of my photography.

But worry I do. When presenting my images to an audience, large or small, I feel diffident; I worry that my images are unworthy, I worry that the audience won't like them – more than that they won't love them as wholeheartedly as I do.

Don't get me wrong, I don't love all my images and I'm not labouring under the misapprehension that those I do love are perfect. I know that they're not. I'm fully aware that even my favourite images have faults in composition or execution. In fact I'm painfully aware of this, its as plain and as haunting to me as a disfiguring ulcer on the face of a dear friend. I'm certainly more aware of the faults in the image than my audience are. Yet, despite their faults, I still love these chosen images. My images are the offspring of my creative spirit and I love them in the same way that I love my children: unconditionally.

I know deep in my heart that I've made a few images that will stand comparison with the best of my peers. I just don't want to shout about it (though I suppose my two readers might legitimately accuse me of at least whispering loudly through "Oceans..."). Why don't I want to be demonstrative? Is it because I'm English? The butterflies in my stomach let me know that I'm not exhibiting false modesty when I shrink from the limelight. If I were supremely confident but trying not to let my audience see that arrogance I wouldn't feel this bad. Paradoxically I feel confident and unsure at the same time; confident that my images are good but also unsure that they are good enough.

The reason for my fluctuating confidence might lie in part in the findings of a study by Dr. David Dunning at Cornell University. He looked at confidence in relation to ability levels. Dunning compared a group of students scores in a series of tests against their expectations. He found that those with the lowest scores consistently overestimated their abilities. More than that, Dunning's team also found that those with the highest scores consistently underestimated their abilities. The researchers put this down to "the fact that, in the absence of information about how others are doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were". I'm sure that this is partly true, but I also know from my own experience that the more I learn about photography the more I realise what there is still to learn. The more I know the smaller my precious hoard of knowledge looks and the more insignificant I feel.

Given my discomfort at showing my images in person, should I, perhaps, confine this activity to only showing them to people who's opinion I value? No, I don't think so. However unpleasant it is for me I need to show my work to as wide an audience as I am able and to listen to what they have to say. I've said before that self-criticism is an essential part of the creative process but I feel that peer review is also – and not just garnering the uncritical opinions of those you trust. That way lies a complete lack of perspective and the withering of creativity. I think that we've all seen this effect from afar in the work of certain pop musicians. There comes a critical point in some successful pop careers where the performer has amassed a considerable amount of money and acquired an entourage. If they are unwise they will have surrounded themselves with yes men;

"Do I look good in this outfit?"
"Yes!"
"Isn't my latest single great?"
"Yes!"
"Wouldn't it be great if I drove my Rolls into the swimming pool?"
"Yes!"
"I am the new messiah!"
"Yes you are!"

You get the picture...

It's been unspoken, perhaps even unconscious until now, but it occurs to me that the reason I show my images is not to feed my ego but to get a perspective on my work. It makes me anxious but I want to find out if I'm one of those incompetents in Dunning's study who is overestimating their ability or if there is some merit in what I'm doing. It would be foolhardy to grant all opinions equal weight but also equally foolhardy to dismiss out of hand those that are critical. There therefore needs to be some system of checks and balances. My approach has been to compare three sets of opinions; my own self-critical view, the opinions of a wider audience and finally the views of those members of my peer group whose work I admire. I tend to filter out opinions that are universally positive in favour of ones where I feel the respondent has made an effort at providing a critique.

The anxiety, then, comes from putting myself up for judgement, opening myself up for criticism. Gratification comes from any degree of validation of my work, especially if that approval comes from those members of my peer group who's work I admire.

So, is it a guilty pleasure? No, I don't think so. It's important to seek and find external positive feedback to counter the inevitable negative effect that arises even from constructive self-criticism. As photographers we need perspective and a context for our work beyond that provided by our own egos. But we also need encouragement if we aren't to become irretrievably disheartened. Showing my images is scary but I just have to grit my teeth and do it!

Although I've taken images since 1979 I don't feel that I became a photographer until 1999...

I can more or less pinpoint the transition from "taker" to "maker" to the day when I created the image on the left.

It was the first time that I had consciously 'seen' a part of the landscape as an abstract rather than just a 'detail'. It was also the first time that I sought to impart more than a simple description. This is an important distinction.

The detail is merely an illustration of a small part of the wider landscape, its ambitions are limited to describing some noteworthy (for the photographer) portion of reality. In this way it fulfills the role of answering the viewers' questions (if they have any!) about the subject of the photograph.

The abstract, on the other hand, doesn't seek to answer anything; rather it forces the viewer to ask some questions of the photograph / photographer: what am I looking at? why did the photographer make this image? why did they choose to compose it like this? how does this make me feel? unmoved? curious? what is the scale? is scale important?

These questions, and many more, make the abstract photograph more 'difficult' to view in the sense that viewing an abstract image requires the active participation of the viewer. Most photographs are viewed passively; we absorb what they show without any conscious effort. But, in the same way that a McDonalds is pleasant to eat but no more – because it requires very little mastication – one of these passive photographs leaves no permanent impression on us. An hour, or at most a day, after we've looked at a passive image it's lost to our memory.

What we get out of photographs is directly linked to the effort that we put into the viewing and it seems obvious to me that the photographer's duty is to try and engage the viewer; not simply by making 'pretty' images but by asking something of them in return for the gift of the image. They should sing for their suppers!

Egoist or egotist...

One of my readers recently said to me that she felt that my images and Joe Cornish's images had no trace of our ego in them. I was puzzled by this comment so I asked her to expand upon her thesis.

As I understand it (and please let me know if I'm wrong – you know who you are!) she meant that the photographic message wasn't being distorted by our egos; that he and I weren't being vain or showing off, but simply trying to convey our feelings about the subject in hand to a wider audience. And furthermore, that this selfless approach gave our images clarity and veracity.

I'm not at all sure that what I do is selfless, in fact I'm fairly certain that, from my perspective, it's the ultimate selfish act. What I'm trying to do, first and foremost, when I make a photograph is to express my feelings about a subject. I can hope that others may like my work but ultimately I make all my images for me. And what makes me share them with others is another selfish desire.

After the creative urge, one of the deepest desires of an artist is to be praised by one's audience, to be recognised for one's work by one's peers, to be patted on the back – in short, to have one's ego well and truly massaged! This is of course also the reason that we find external criticism of our work so difficult; when someone attacks our work they are attacking our personalities at the deepest level. An artist's images are an expression of their inner self. So saying that an image is rubbish isn't at all the same as saying that you hate the cut of their clothes or even that you hate the colour of their hair. These physical manifestations (even though the latter might have a fundamental genetic link!) are only about surface, mere appearance. You can always change your tailor or buy some hair dye but saying an image is poor is an attack on our ego, the very basis of our being.

John Szarkowzki, the American photographer and former Museum of Modern Art curator, organised an exhibition entitled "Mirrors and Windows" at MoMA in New York in 1978. His premise for the exhibition was that all photographs are either "mirrors" of the photographer's concerns or "windows" onto the world. The first are more likely to be concerned with abstract ideas about the world, to fall into what one might call Art, and the latter concerned with seemingly plain descriptions of the world, to fall into what might be termed Documentary.

I would contend that images cannot simply be one or the other, but rather must be a blend. There is no such thing as a pure documentary photograph. The image is fundamentally linked to reality; it is a partial document of the moment and place at which it was made. But the hand of the photographer when they release the shutter is driven by the mind of the photographer – a notoriously biased influence! Similarly there is no such thing as an image that purely reflects the concerns of the photographer. The audiences' interpretation of an image is derive as much by their viewpoint as by that of the photographer. All photographs cannot help but contain an element of ego and an element of truth.

I would still feel flattered (and nothing appeals more to the ego than flattery!) if my reader felt that I let the subject in any of my images speak more loudly than my own voice. In other words that my style or vision, direct expressions of my personality, were subordinate to the subject. I would feel that I had failed if the photographs screamed "Me, me, me!" to the audience. I want the subject to appear as if one were staring into a limpid pool, to be presented in as pellucid a manner as possible. This might seem contradictory given that I stated right at the beginning that the making of images was a fundamentally selfish occupation for me. But, ironically, photographers are alone in the world of artistic representation in finding that the more transparent their style the greater the reputation they may command as photographers.

Every other visual artist seeks to differentiate their vision from that of others in their field, to proclaim it as unique, by dint of overt stylistic devices; van Gogh's textural application of paint, Rembrandt's glowing depiction of light, Lowry's stick men. But photographers wish to impress upon their audience the fundamental truthfulness of what they have seen. The use of photographic mannerisms, such as obvious filtration or extreme wide angle views, only serve to undermine any claims to veracity. Such mannerisms overtly declare the presence of the photographer when they wish to declare what they have seen as paramount. They want to present their work as a slice of the real world, albeit one that only they were gifted enough to perceive and present to the viewer. The unique voice of the photographer is, necessarily, to be found not only in what they choose to photograph but also in the way that they compose the image.

But the photograph is a trick of the light, a visual sleight of hand. It presents us with the photographer's vision, collapsing all possible viewpoints into their single one, but does it in such a way that we ignore this distillation and adopt their 'real' viewpoint as if it were our own. In this way the photographer almost becomes invisible, it's almost as if in some bizarre way they played no part in the making of the image. Perhaps this is why my reader felt that there was no trace of ego in my images.

The evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins famously made the claim in the "Selfish Gene" that there's no such thing as altruism, that even a bee that gives its own life to protect the hive is ultimately being selfish. Similarly sharing our view of the world, a product of our ego, isn't being altruistic. If I, as a photographer, can claim not only insight but also veracity for my images then people will think that I'm a better photographer – yet another way for my ego to be massaged. But the ego can be subtle, and in that subtlety others may benefit. Ultimately, it matters not how much a photograph is the product of our ego so long as others can extract some good from viewing it.

To make or not to make...

A tongue in cheek comment has got me thinking about the infrequency of my image making and wondering whether I should be anxious about it!

The question was posed; if we make fewer images as we become more proficient photographers then what would happen if one ever achieved genius level? Would it mean that one would never make an image again? Perhaps the genius landscape photographer would still wander across the land, a forlorn figure, glancing around from time to time and completing a stunning composition in their head but never bothering to get their camera out of the bag. Perhaps they have achieved some Zen like state of perfection but perhaps it's just a case of seen that before, done that already!

It is undoubtedly true that many photographers (myself included) make fewer images the longer that they have been photographers. Rather than a symptom of creeping apathy or rising indifference this is, in fact, a healthy sign. It means that we're learning from our accumulated experience, that we're realising more consistently what images will or won't work before we press the shutter. I'd be very worried indeed if I was still making as many mistakes now as I did twenty years ago!

Making fewer images doesn't necessarily mean that at some point we will run out of images or feel that we don't need to make any more. I find that the longer I work as a photographer the more possibilities I realise for image making, that I see beyond the obvious and notice subjects that a year or two before I wouldn't even have realised could be used as the basis for successful images. However, these possibilities are often more technically or compositionally challenging than my earlier work. And this factor also means that I'm likely to make fewer images.

So, rather than feel downhearted, I view this dwindling as a positive sign. The images that I make may be fewer in number but I feel that their quality improves with each passing year.

What would a judge think of my work?

This thought occurred to me whilst I was looking at some truly exquisite black & white images taken by Tony Gardner, a participant on a recent large format workshop led by Joe Cornish and I. Tony had a selection of superb high key images, many of which had, to be fair, been judged as prize winners. But the story relating to one image in particular was both depressing and fascinating.

Tony showed us an image that might be thought of as being in the Michael Kenna school, though not in any way derivative of that great photographer's work. This image had been a medal winner at one salon yet when it was presented it to another judge at his own club the judge took a cursory glance and then turned the print to the wall and made the following remark, "This is the kind of image that looks better this way round." What did he mean by this?

Tony took it to mean that in this judge's opinion the image wasn't very good, that the most interesting thing about it was the array of judges' awards affixed to the rear of the mount; first, distinction, highly commended etc. More than that, that this judge was surprised at the accolades that had been heaped upon this image. As I've said before in previous posts, photography is relative. So, we can't castigate the judge for his opinion – that is , after all, what he was called upon to provide. The problem is the manner in which it was delivered.

What gives him the right to belittle somebody's work? What possible benefit is there in being harsh in such an unconstructive way? I can only think that it made the judge feel superior and that, sadly, that's how he thought he ought to feel. He'd been called upon to exercise his judgement. He felt that his opinion was exalted. So, it would seem, he felt that he was superior to the photographers' whose work he was criticizing.

But that is surely not the true role of the judge. He should be humble. He must bear in mind that whatever he feels about the image presented to him the person whose vision it is has no doubt poured their heart and soul into its making. When we attack another keen photographer's work we are making a personal attack on that person. We imbue our photographs with our own spirit, we put our heart and soul into making images and for someone to be so flippant and cruel is inexcusable.

Of course the judge can be critical, that is his role, but any criticism should be constructive not destructive. The latter helps no one to achieve better results. A judge's role is not to show how clever they are but to help the photographers to achieve a higher level of work by praising good work and constructively criticising less well executed work. It is also beholden on the judge to be knowledgeable about photography – not in some narrow, parochial way but in a deep and broad way. Of course this would instantly disqualify many of the judges on the club circuit which is hardly going to go down well. The judges role should be to serve the photographers whose work they are appraising but all too often they appear to feel that they are doing them a favour by deigning to give an opinion, however ill-informed or biased that opinion may be.

Many artists have fragile egos precisely because, to a greater or lesser degree, they expose their souls in their work. When a critic turns around and says that what they have done is c**p they are apt to feel that this is a personal attack on them as creator of the work.

It would surely be more productive and less destructive if camera clubs used a secret ballot sytem to judge images entered in their competitions rather than asking the opinion of an outside arbiter with dubious credentials. How many judges allow their work to be scrutenized and open for possible villification?

I'm still stung by a remark made 10 years ago by an art buyer when I showed her the image on the right. It was one of the first detail images that I had made and reminded me of the stark simplicity of a Zen garden (follow the Rock Garden link). At the time it was one of my favourite images. She glanced at it briefly and quickly pushed it across the lightbox, making the derisory comment, "Oh look, a turd on the beach..." I was devastated. But the real damage was not just the short term shock but that for many years I couldn't shake off that description. The transparency stayed hidden away in my filing cabinet and was shown to no one. Whenever I viewed the image it had lost the power to evoke tranquility and had just become a vision of mamallian effluent stranded by the falling tide... Now you can't get that association out of your head either! What is said about an image, the linguistic tags associated with it, are often stronger than the complex but difficult to grasp feelings evoked by the purely visual information. These feelings are hard to express precisely because they don't relate easily to language. Words swamp them, drown their delicate form beneath overpoweringly concrete signification.

But in the intervening years I've come out of therapy and come to realise a couple of things.

Firstly that my vision isn't necessarily going to be universally accepted by the general public, art buyers or my fellow photographers. What matters is that I continuously critically appraise my own work and that I accept the constructive criticism of my peers in the spirit in which it was offered. Secondly, that the opinions of my peers are far more important to me than those of outside arbiters. I must be, at all costs, true to myself. If I'm diverted from my course by every careless remark passed by a viewer then I shall never make any headway.

To return to the question I posed at the beginning of this post, "What would a judge think of my work?" I guess I don't know, is the honest answer, but more than that I don't really care anymore!

I've been talking to my editor...

That's something most writers try and avoid doing, but Eddie Ephraums isn't your average editor. We've been discussing the form of my next book, or rather trying to find a form for it. I'll not go into detail now but something that came up in the discussions has intrigued me. One of the things we wondered was whether my photographs were statements or questions.

This reminded me that when I was a Focus on Imaging a couple of weeks ago I became engaged in conversation with a charming man named Ian Biggar. Amongst the many things we discussed one anecdote stuck in my mind.

He described a conversation he'd overheard on a photographic workshop. The leader asked a participant "What are you trying to say in your image?"

The participant replied "I'm not sure I'm trying to say anything yet. I guess I'm still listening." This struck me as a very worthwhile approach!

When I'm working I try to be open to the possibilties for image making rather than having a fixed outcome in mind. What's important to me is that I'm making an enquiry about my surroundings in my images rather than imposing a conclusion. I'm not seeking to make definitive statements, I don't know the answers.

A well known spot...

Well, after two days trekking through the wilderness, getting stuck and getting lost, we finally gained our permits from the BLM and were allowed to enter photographic "heaven", Coyote Buttes North. Well, perhaps not exactly heaven but certainly somewhere rich with photographic potential.

The image was made at The Wave, perhaps the most famous site in Coyote Buttes. Heavy rain just 10 days before we arrived had transformed this side canyon into a beautiful reflecting pool. This portion of the wave was made famous as the cover image on Jack Dykinga's wonderful book "Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau" but I was very conscious that I should make my own interpretation. It seems to me that the task of an artist is to express how he feels about his subject and to do this in as original a way as possible.

There is a dubious, and perhaps unhealthy, obsession with the naming of locations in photography. Particular places have acquired an almost holy status: Bryce Canyon, Point Lobos, Yosemite or even Dunstanburgh or (the Grandaddy of them all) The Sea of Steps in Wells Cathedral. The Wave is also just such a place. A criticism that was repeatedly levelled at my book, Landscape Within, was that I didn't name the locations of the images. My reasons for this was not because I wished to be protectionist. I wanted the viewer to interpret the image based upon just what they saw – how I had composed the image, my choice of perspective lighting etc. – rather than what they think they already know about a place.

Why the obsession with Place? Perhaps it's because of the strong, ineluctable, bond between the image and reality. A good picture was made at a particular place therefore that's the place to make another good image. The key word here is "another", not the same but a different image.

But I think that this is only part of the reason. This problem of "location worship" had been forcefully brought home to me on a recent workshop when a participant had shown his portfolio of a dozen or so perfectly executed landscape images. The only problem is that they weren't his images – they were technically excellent copies of other photographers' compositions, often shot in the same lighting conditions and same season as the original. I asked him why, when he was obviously a technically competent photographer, he was repeating other people's work rather than making statements of his own? His answer was that his time was short for photography, fitted in between work and family commitments, and that he needed to be sure that he would be able to make an image when he ventured out. This, for me, is no reason at all.

I make images as personal statements and don't wish to redundantly repeat what somebody else has already "said".

There is another side to this location fetish. Many photographers jealously guard information about their favourite locations, something that I suspect some readers of my book thought I was doing by not naming the places. This secrecy, this hoarding of locations, strikes me as extemely paranoid. Both the workshop participant and these hoarders are suffering from crises of confidence, one worries that they can't find images without inspiration from an external source (another "better" photographer). He thought that he couldn't find images of his own because he lacked the confidence to wander, receptive to inspiration, and let the images find him. Whilst, ironically, the location hoarder worries that a "better" photographer might make a better image in "their own" Place.

Self criticism is a vital part of the creative process, we all need to look at the compositions we've made and assess whether each has made the grade. But this necesary self analysis can turn into a deep seated lack of confidence in one's abilities, even amongst well-known and feted photographers. The hoarder shouldn't worry about anyone making a better image. Photography, like all Art, is relative. We can compare one image to another and decide that we prefer one but we cannot say with absolute certainty that one is categorically superior to another. Indeed we may well change our mind, on a different day with the wind blowing in a different direction. Perhaps what the hoarder fears in a profound way is that people will prefer not simply another photographer's viewpoint (and all the elements of composition, light and serendipity associated with that) but actually prefer the other photographer's view of the world. This is a pointless waste of energy for beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln "You can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not please all of the people all of the time."

The story behind the image...

This image was made on a visit to Coyote Buttes in Northern Arizona in November 2006. I was accompanied by two friends, Alex Donnelly and David Whistance. We had failed to get permits online for the north (which includes The (famous) Wave) so we had to go to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)Ranger station every morning to put our names in the lottery, a 35 mile drive from where we were staying in Page. Our names weren't drawn until the second morning so we decided to explore the south section on the first two days.

The first of these visits was to an area called Cottonwood Cove. I'd never been to Coyote Buttes South (CBS) before but some research beforehand showed that it was just as good as the north though lacking in any "set pieces". No bad thing really as there is more scope for producing something original.

It's a 35 mile drive from Page to the turnoff for the unpaved House Rock Road, then 14 miles on the dirt road (reasonable washboard surface) then turn off onto a narrow sandy track towards the abandoned ranch of Poverty Flats six miles distant (this route had been recommended by a volunteer at the BLM station as the more direct route via Paw Hole was probably impassable due to deep sand). The track was a bit hairy in places, with soft sand and rocky ledges, but we eventually made it to the ranch. Nobody had lived there since the early sixties so there was plenty of photogenic decay to make images of – in my element!

After about an hour, during which I made the image above, we set off for Cottonwood and promptly got stuck in deep sand, about fifty yards from where we had parked. We hadn't seen anybody since we left the House Rock Road and this area is the least visited part of the Wilderness Study Area so we didn't feel at all anxious... Luckily we'd bought shovels and sand ladders – no, of course we hadn't!! We set to with our bare hands to shift sand from under the wheels and put rocks and wood in the ruts for some traction. It was at this point that we discovered that our shiny SUV didn't have any drive shafts at the back – it was 2X4 instead of 4X4. No point complaining to the car hire company as the contract forbade us taking it off road anyway! After about half an hour of digging we heard another vehicle approaching. Salvation we hoped. It was a German guy called Marek who found the whole thing very amusing and proceeded to take lots of digi-snaps of me half buried under the car! He did help dig eventually and we managed to get the car out after about 40 minutes. We asked him what the road was like to Cottonwood and he told us that it was fine, or at least no worse than the ground we had already covered. Suitably reassured we set off for Cottonwood.

You can probably guess what happened next – surprise, surprise we got stuck (again!) We tried to dig the car out for about 50 minutes but only managed to move it about six feet. It was around 14:00 by this time and we had to decide whether to stay with the car or try and walk out. If we followed the road back it would be around 15 miles before we would get to anywhere that we might see somebody else. Alternatively we could cut across country to Coyote Buttes north (CBN) and hope to meet somebody at the Wire Pass entrance as they left around sunset. We knew that there were 20 people in CBN so this was probably our best chance of help. We hadn't seen any more sign of anybody since Marek had left so the alternative was to spend an unknown number of nights waiting with the vehicle. The BLM station had had 14 spare permits out of a possible 20 for Cottonwood after we got ours, so we knew that there couldn't be all that many people around.

We made the decision to walk out via CBN and thought that we would take our camera gear in case we saw something we wanted to photograph en route. We set off up the track and after about a mile came to the crest of the first ridge. It was at this point that we realised the enormity of the task ahead and that we probably wouldn't get a chance to make any images on the way! We could barely see the back of CBN and estimated that it was over 5 miles away. This would make the total distance to walk around 9 to 10 miles across rough terrain, both bare rock and soft sand carrying around 45 pounds each. Aaargh!!

I was feeling very pissed off about getting us stuck, despite assurances from Alex and David that they wouldn't even have got as far as we had if they'd been driving. This was the first time that this had happened to me in 20 years driving to inaccessible places, and I set off at a (grumpy) sharpish pace. In retrospect this was very lucky for us. It took us around three hours to get to The Wave in CBN. We'd only stopped once on the way for about ten minutes breather to eat a snack and drink some water. Sunset was around 17:30 so we knew that we were cutting it fine. There was a small pond in The Wave due to recent heavy rain (the same storm that had wiped out the ladders in Antelope). Alex decided to take his boots off but David and I just waded through. It was a good job that we did as I heard voices as we came out of the canyon on the other side. A couple were just walking past and they told us that they were the last people there! They were amazed that we had walked that far with all our gear and were more than happy to offer us a lift (luckily they had a big enough vehicle parked at Wire Pass). The rest of the walk was reasonably uneventful, though I felt that my legs had turned to lead by the time we reached the dry wash and the last half mile before the car park.

It turned out that our saviors were staying at the same hotel in Page. We offered to buy them dinner in return for their lift and arranged to meet them around 21:00. I went back to my room and had a vigorous shower to remove several pounds of sand from my ears followed by a long soak in the bath. Around 20:30 Alex knocked on my door to say that he'd found somebody to tow the car out for a couple of hundred bucks, the only problem was that they wanted to do it now! It was too good an offer to turn down but as I was the driver on the hire agreement it meant that I would have to forego dinner. The guys that Alex had met were the Navajo guides from Upper Antelope Canyon. I set off with them to pick up a bigger vehicle from the Reservation. I didn't think very much about this until we transferred to the other vehicle and they loaded a lot of equipment on board including jacks, shovels, ropes, and lastly a high powered lamp and a hunting rifle. It suddenly occurred to me that I was driving off into the middle of nowhere with a pocket full of cash and three guys that I didn't really know who also had a gun. The clincher was when then made me where a T-shirt with a target mark on the front – just kidding!

It took about an hour and a half to get back to the car. The Navajos were all really nice guys. Chatting on the way there they said that there was only one towing company in Page. They had had a fire on one of the vehicles that they use to ferry people up the dry wash to the canyon and asked the tow company to quote for removing the vehicle as they couldn't shift it with their trucks. He wanted $800 even though the vehicle was only about half a mile from the main road so God knows how much he would have charged us to pick up our car. I had contemplated telling the car hire company that we had been abducted by aliens and dumped in the middle of the desert but decided that they would probably still charge us a fortune even though they would probably have believed us.

It turned out that there weren't any tow points anywhere on the vehicle so they couldn't just pull it out. They used their shovels to dig away the worst of the sand, lowered the tyre pressures and managed to drive it out, with four of us pushing, within 15 minutes of us reaching the car. A great adventure (in retrospect) but a little worrying at times.

The next day was supposed to be a rest day. Alex had gone off early to put our names in the lottery for permits for CBN. When David and I arrived around 09:30 he was grinning from ear to ear and we rightly assumed that we had got the permits. We decided to spend the day in an area in Coyote Buttes south (CBS) called Paw Hole and had been assured that we would have no difficulty getting there in our vehicle. It was only supposed to be a short walk from the car park but when we left the House Rock Road we found the track quite tricky and bailed out after about a mile because we were (understandably) a little paranoid about getting stuck again. We then had to walk for about 3 kilometers uphill in soft sand. The rock formations were good but nowhere near as impressive as those we had seen on the previous day. We were all fairly tired on the walk back at the end of the day but looking forward to the next day. But that's another story (or post anyway).

Fern Frond

The structure of living things fascinates me. The great natural philosopher Robert Hooke noted in the 17th century how when you studied man made objects through a lens the structure became cruder the higher the magnification, whereas natural objects revealed finer and finer detail the more you magnified them. There is a deep beauty in natural forms.

Ferns are a particular favourite of mine because of the elegance and simplicity of the structure of each frond. Mathematicians have realised in the last thirty years that they can model infinitely complex structures by using simple equations repeated many times with the result from one fed back in as the variable in the next. The most famous of these fractal equations is probably the Mandelbrot set – something often dismissively used as a screen saver. The fern can be modeled using such a simple equation, great beauty arising from simplicity.

Kyriakos Kalorkoti is a professor of mathematics who also happens to be addicted to landscape photography and a producer of very fine images. I'm priveleged to know him and we have had many fascinating discussions about photography, reality and art. In an article on his website he writes about the old question of whether photography is Art (note the capitalisation!):

"Much effort has been expended by various critics on the question of whether photography is Art; i.e., can it be included in the growing set of work and activities that are labeled as Art (since there is no generally accepted a priory definition of Art). One of the objections is the fact that a photograph is an image of some existing physical reality (ignoring manipulations).This objection can only be entertained if we go with the facile view that material existence is somehow mundane and thus is of no particular interest to Art; put briefly the view seems partly to be that material existence is no rival to imagination and all that photography can do is to record it. In fact existence of any kind is deeply problematic and mysterious; the nature of material reality is by no means straightforward and is thus more than a fitting source for image making that aims at transformation and revelation."

I find myself so strongly in agreement with this insight!

Why do we praise representations from our imagination above those springing from reality? Photography is partly to blame for this. Before the discovery of the photographic process a large proportion of the effort of painters was applied to producing the most realistic rendition of the world possible on a canvass – that is not to say that the objects or subjects depicted existed but just that they looked as if they might. In other words Art strove to not only express the thoughts or emotions of the artist (or their patron!) but to do so in as "truthful" a way as possible. Making the image look "real" leant it weight as document. Along comes photography, a mechanical process that effortlessly produces images drawn from the stuff of reality. The painter's years of effort suddenly seemed for nought, how could they compete? A new direction was needed and what was left but to travel further into the realms of the imagination. That doesn't make the study of reality in photography invalid, it just makes it something that photography can do better than painting.

Blue Snow

I'm fascinated by how photography allows us a new insight into reality by giving us access to different visual fields; insights such as "distorted" perspectives (either compressed or elongated through using long or short focal lengths). Or colour without the in-built filtration applied by our minds. Or the compression of four dimensions into two. I intend to use this space to discuss some of these ideas and to talk more personally about the image making process. The blog is new but I've been making images for 20 years and more so I'll be posting both old and new images and writing a little about each; sometimes profound, sometimes irreverent.

This image was made on a recent visit to Scotland leading a photographic workshop. I think that it typifies some of the elements that I strive for in an image: simplicity, strong lines, contrasting colours. It also demonstrates how an image can be found almost anywhere. There was nothing special about this bank of snow other than the way the morning sun was just grazing the tops of the grass giving the colour contrast with the blue-sky lit shadowed snow.