In the Weeds

It is now nearly 4 years since I started my studies with the OCA, a time that seems much longer and yet so short.  In that time I have developed greatly as a photographer, learning new skills, developing new sensibilities and sensitivities, but most of all I have experienced a change in the way that I look at and understand the world.  It is not simply looking with a rectangular frame imposed on my vision, but a fascination with the way that objects in the environment associate with each other, how they align, overlap, intertwine, how right angles give way to curves, how colour plays against structure, in short how the world is constructed in the local.

I am a geometrist, I straighten pictures, I align things, my CDs are in alphabetic order (over 1200 of them), I clear my work desk every evening, in short I like an ordered world.  In my photographs I try to take the chaos of my surroundings and impose order on them, I use the camera to investigate structure.  This lends itself better to the landscape genre, however, I also think it has its place in social documentary.  This is the source of my current discomfort with my course.  When I was working on my final selection of images for assignment 2 I was consistently advised to crop the images closer, to make the people the essence of the image.  This enhanced the images in the sense that the emotive power of the human subjects became much stronger, but it went against my desire to impose order.  I want to place my human subjects within the context of their surroundings, to balance the landscape with the personal, not to make the person the only subject of the images.  In this sense I find myself a landscape photographer directed towards making portraits.  This is not what I want to get out of photography.  I am using photography to help me understand the world around me, but not necessarily the people who inhabit it.

To put this into a historical perspective, I love the work of Stephen Shore, but am not terribly into Annie Leibowitz (celebrity work aside).  I simply have no need to get up close to my subject.

This is a key learning for me and will inform the remainder of my course, even if it means making lower marks in the assessment, I need to be working on something that interests me and extends my understanding of photography.  I believe that I am finding my voice, and that this voice is not in close photographic portraits, whether formal or snatched.

This brings me to the real subject of this blog entry, a return once again to the urban landscape and an investigation of the mundane, trying to make it beautiful.  In my photography there is a constant source of inspiration in my work and that is abstract modernist painting and in particular colour field painting.  Possibly not very fashionable any more in our post-modern world, I still find the ordered harmony of these works inspiring.  It is not something that directly applies to photography, just an ethos to look at how shape and colour interact.

With this in mind I recently shot a bunch of landscape close ups using a macro lens wide open.  This was triggered after a day hiking in the alps.

Apart from the obvious film references (thanks Dewald), I started to wonder what these fields of flowers looked like very close up, how the patterns of colour interrelated with the structure of the plants.  I don't have the time these days to spend a day in the alps with my macro (I should and I know that, but tell my managers - I have 3 at the moment).  I turned to my local park, a small piece of land containing endless photographic possibilities.  The borders of the park are allowed to grow wild and within them I found what I was looking for:

There is a temptation to focus too much on individual form and detail, the next shot is an example of that problem

What I was looking for was something more like the following, where colour is a more dominant feature, although shape is still very present

OK, this is not really what I had in mind, but I love this for the balance of colour and structure - it has an abstraction, but is not colour field.

The next photo has too much structure, but I the hint of yellow starts to play with the colour a little

This one is far more effective, with nicely graded colour blends, but still retaining a sense of what we are looking at

In the next two the connection to reality starts to drain, but is still present

I accept a comment made by a fellow student that these photographs borrow more from Monet than Mondrian, but in that comment lies the challenge for photography.  Photography, however abstract, is an art of the real, we are capturing something that exists, not building a fabrication of the mind.  A photograph (for me) must always hint at what the subject is, otherwise it is simply a smudge of light.

This was a rather playful piece of work, keeping myself engaged with the art through doing something I love, taking a look at the world through a macro lens, creating a perspective that only a camera can reveal.  It parallels my underwater work and is very much inspired by what I have experienced photographing corals and the strange creatures that inhabit them.

Getting back to the geometrist in me, my final destination for this set of work was a square collage:

At that point I thought job done, then the surprise:

You never know where a project will go when you start.  An idle Sunday afternoon and I got published again. LOL

It's a strange world at time, but here I was having fun and perhaps is showed.  I need to do the same in my formal work, have fun