David Ward Exhibition Talks - David Ward, "Overlooked"

well thanks very much for coming along to to listen to us all speak this afternoon it certain so to see such a kind of enthusiastic crowd of a bunch of very talented people out there as well as as well as on this side of the podium I'm going to talk a little bit about the sort of themes that go along with a link with the photographs that are exhibited in the room next door but it's not exactly I kind of blow-by-blow account of that it's more the ideas that underpin my kind of ethos for photography what what motivates me to make pictures and we'll go through those ideas that are sort of encompassed in the notion of overlooked this is kind of a definitely not overlooked boom as I believe it photographers here says on occasion when they see a photograph like oh sorry one went one too far so this is not something you can kind of easily overlook although it happens to be that I overlooked it for about seven or eight years because it was sitting on my hard drive and I hadn't actually looked at it at all and then when I was getting pictures together for this talk I noticed again in common with most landscape photographers I started off really wanting to shoot the Vista and and much as Jay might think that I'm derogatory about the Vista I still love I still love vistas I do love that wider view of the landscape I think I struggle with it because I just find it difficult to use it as a tool of expression or a tool of Investigation maybe for me photographically I wanted to capture places and moments like this with energy and light and something really kind of momentous going on you know that sort of light that gives energy to the moment that the whatever it was I think a sixth of a second or I think I saw this was and to and also to kind of talk about the energy of all those cycles that create the landscape that we see the erosive force of the of the ocean in this case and then you have something like this you know again a place that you would find it hard to overlook this is a this guy standing over here is a chap called oleic who's a Russian photographer who's traveled with Joe and I quite a few times and he's clearly you know he's not overlooked anything although he is overlooking all of it in this particular instance it's hard nay impossible I think when you're confronted with something like that to to turn your back on it and and even I as somebody who Sam Gregory the guy from talk cast described as the detail man when he interviewed me the other day even I struggled to to turn my back on something like that I have a question that I know and this is this is in no way kind of fun derogatory of any of the of the images that we've seen today but I think in social media terms now there's that there's a sort of wall of the spectacular going on with with vistas rather than the quiet more kind of measured more contemplative pictures that Joe and other people make it's about making the most spectacular view of somewhere the weakens see and and you know this is undoubtedly a spectacular spot but my question is when everything from a cup of coffee to the Grand Canyon is awesome where do we go you know what is there left to talk about in the landscape when it's like that when everybody's vying to make the most spectacular landscape how do we differentiate between them so for me there was a there was a kind of um a desire to do something different not just to concentrate on on places like this the wonderful as it is you know especially in conditions like this sadly one of the one of the side effects I'll talk about this a little bit during this talk well the side effects of places like this becoming known through the social media world is that it's almost impossible now to revisit them and the one or two or three people there when I first went there with Daniel Bergman five or six years ago maybe seven or eight years ago we were the only people there now you go there and there will be 20 or 30 people so the chances of seeing a view like this 20 or 30 doesn't sound many as there's more than that in this room but the chances of seeing someone like this without footprints all over that snow are next to impossible it just it just doesn't happen anymore so what what defines the visitor will way way back when I wrote landscape within in 2004 I said that what is defined by the circling horizon by the inconstant sky and the circling horizon it places you on the surface of the globe and in in lots of ways it's the denial of intimacy I know Jay was was was arguing against that but I and I and those particular examples I think we're a good support for for your argument but in most cases people are not trying to link those two sides they're not trying to link the intimate with the wider they're trying to emphasize something like this and I found myself wanting to do something that was more personally satisfying I suppose it's not that there's anything wrong with there I loved being somewhere like that that that is just amazing to be in a position like that but I wanted to do something else and one of the things that I realized quite early on is that the exclusion of the sky just changes how you see something it just it was only a sliver of sky in that in that previous picture but just taking it out changes the emphasis completely the world flattens it becomes more intimate and when you start looking at the building blocks of the landscape but the tiny little details you find that they are all pretty much as interesting as the large landscape once you actually start looking at those things that are overlooked I wanted that intimacy I also wanted anonymity these places and again especially in the social media era that the well-known places it becomes almost impossible to make a photograph of it without it being all straightforwardly compared with whoever else's pictures of that place and this was true even a long time ago when we started out it was it was true of some places not so many places probably and so I became intrigued with looking in the things that other people were overlooking as I saw it with a picture like this it doesn't matter where it is there's no sign next to the road that says you stop here and you take a photograph there's no sign on the internet that gives you the GPS coordinates that says this is the place you need to go to you to take to take a picture I don't have to share this this is this is about me this is my personal view this is this is something that that moves me in a way the kind of millennial pace of erosion across the landscape in a wider landscape makes it much more static it makes the concentration of photography naturally in a few places because those places that the landscape elements don't change very quickly something like this is not set in stone three weeks later four weeks later and whatever it's not there well the day afterwards it would have been different so there's a dynamism about photographing places like this which I enjoy there is dynamism in a landscape normally it's provided by those in constant elements by the rain by the fog by the snow but the individual parts that you're photographing don't change quite so quickly now this is a rather well known mountain in Iceland thanks to a man called David Platt who took the most amazing photograph of this mountain Kirk you fell wreathed in an Aurora and I think I first went there I think the year after we went so 2001 something like that you nobody went to that part of ISIL and really in those days there were very few photographic tours anyway and the last time I went there which is probably five or six years ago I went with Daniel Bergman and we went no actually this is after that but the last time I went at night I went Daniel Bergman and we we would we would gone a couple of times to photograph it at night because it is amazing against the against the Milky Way if you get the right right conditions or aurora and there were 50 or 60 people and it starts to become sort of scrum a sort of a tripod wars situation so I went again in winter 2016 I think this was and I took a view of that place which I thought was overlooked because now there is a prescription for how you photograph Kirk you fell in lots of people's minds there's a way that you do it and I didn't want to I didn't want to take the prescription so you can say this is an overlooked opportunity for a Vista another famous place that did fly in in Namibia I should say I'm apologies for the quality of this image it's a it's a JPEG from a Panasonic LX v it's quite ancient and it's in the days when I didn't know any better well first I it's a Vista Dead Flay is typically shot like this the the wider view we were incredibly lucky on this morning was that there was fog rolling in from the sea about 60 kilometers away which is a reasonably rare occurrence and it was it was really astonishing to be there in fact I was so astonished by the whole thing that although I had a five foot camera with me I didn't actually make a picture on the five four because I was just like oh my god after shoot so these places become dominated by a a way of seeing them and and for some people and rehearse but I guess for a lot of people it becomes hard to move beyond that prescription but I want to I want to go to somewhere like this and I want to make my own interpretation I want to I want to turn my back on what other people have done and and shoot what I want to shoot so this is this central group of trees there and it gives you a very different feeling for that space and it makes it a closed space it makes it a more intimate space again and it concentrates your your mind on what the light is doing in that how it bounces off the off the salt pan your closer to the trees you get more of a sense of their age I mean they're incredibly old they they probably were alive for about the the kind of estimates vary but between six or seven hundred years and they've been dead for about 800 years so these these trees started out 15 years ago and and so that tells you something about the aridity of the of the place it's completely on a different scale from anything we can imagine really in the UK so instead of doing that reaching for my panoramic setting I use the medium telephoto lens it's focused stacked because I couldn't get it sharp all the way through without doing that but it gives us I think a more satisfying contemplate airy rather than exclamatory view now if we if we kind of stick to the to the prescription as some people do then there's a danger of this kind of thing happening so again long long time ago when did we go to antelope first time mm yeah this is upper antelope this is the easier one to get into because you walk in on the flap and now apparently when they drive the people up there in the bus is up the wash the the guide gives them a little talk about what settings they need to put their iPhones on and anybody's got an Android phone he gets a bit confused doesn't quite know what to say to them and when we went that first time we both had five Falls and we actually made pictures with the five four set up on a tripod in there and this is this is no longer the case now one of the things that I've I suppose mentioned a lot of time in talks over the years is that it's a good idea to turn your back on the honeypot on that on the place or at least to move to one side and do a little different shot Joe went to photograph from Marin bells a few years ago and and discovered a completely different view of these iconic mountains there was a kind of again of potential fisticuffs breaking out along the shore because you get 100-200 people in a hundred meter stretch and there they're all vying for position as somebody jiggles somebody else's tripod and apparently there have been fistfights there but if you go quarter-mile away was it Joe yeah yeah well Joe's call from Ollie's everybody else is mild but you know you find you find something equally pleasing so I've sort of championed that notion for a long time that we should look for the for the other rather than what everybody feels they should chew and I've been accused of trying to pull the ladder up behind me somebody said well you've been there you've done that so so why are you saying that to us you know you're denying us the possibility well there's a couple of problems I have with that notion one I'm not denying if somebody really wants to do then that that's fine but they are more likely now in the social media age to encounter something like this than what we encountered a long time ago and we were incredibly privileged and incredibly lucky to be photographing in in that time and to really it's a piece of advice photographic advice about actually if you want to make something that's more specific more tuned to what you find amazing in the landscape it's better to go and find your own thing rather than repeat so this is a Windows 10 scream not my photograph I mean I wish it was because presumably whoever took this made quite a lot of money out of it just a few years ago when I first went here this is in Ferrari Key Beach and the northern end of South Island Saskia and I went here with a stepfather and a mum and there really was nobody there on the beach now since this and 11,000 Instagram posts it's a it's a place to go on it on a on a sunset so this is some not quite the same because I couldn't go where I wanted to be with the two I you know the two stacks just kiss each other because that's where all the instagramers were and they'd ruined all the sand in the floor ground and there's a reason why Ansel Adams said that the real skill of landscape photographer reason photography is knowing where to stand there is just one place where the two United States kiss each other and no Joker but for some reason Saskia wasn't keen on jogging through there sure I think thank you having a Kip in the in the jeans you had enough of me messing around taking photographs I think so so this is this is a little bit saturated for me and actually I think I'd probably rather change the composition a little bit if it's gonna do it hello yay and that changes the emphasis quite a lot I think it links that the geographic forms but really I kind of thought I'd rather do something different entirely walking back to the car away from that view and found this scene which all the the instagramers that the sunset people were walking past and you know with their beers and they're in their cameras and no messing about in the surf taking pictures of each other and not in my opinion communing with the landscape in my opinion they were consuming the landscape this was about going out into the landscape and not actually thinking about what that place is about it's about having a beer and a nice evening and there's nothing wrong with that in lots of ways I mean why should they have that same depth of feeling as Joe and I on you people have who've spent their lives really being fascinated by the landscape there's no reason why they need to but I just thought it was sad that they were passing by these opportunities so I'm gonna William Blake right this and I think that's a pretty good kind of summation of the depth the feeling that you can have from just looking at something as simple as that so to hear the saturation of the sand as it blows across that space this is a focus state image and it's really interesting when I was stacking it because you could see all these separate shots there were grains of sand in different places as they were as they were blowing across to be away from the madding crowd so look at what has been overlooked and I loved I loved that feeling suffused with the same light as that bigger view but infused with a very different feeling I'm not I'm not suggesting this is superior I'm just saying it's overlooked and I find these kind of contemplations personally more engaging and enriching and really as photographers that that is the key to what we do it's about following your heart when you're out there making your photograph now as a child growing up in the sixties there was a TV program called ask the family with Robert Robinson how many of you remember that and they used to but he's they used to do a little quiz which was yeah what's this you know though do you recognize it yet not in a Rolf Harris kind of way but but I think I was that that kind of thing fascinated me there you know they would take some ordinary domestic item and they get really close on it and then they'd assume out and at some point you would think oh yeah I can see what that is but actually when you're in close it was also fascinating and that that selection that removal from context made that portion of reality somehow more interesting so this was taken just just recently in in the Pecos in Spain it's a it's a Mullen plant which was growing on a wall top and I just loved the well the suggestion I think there's a suggestion of flames there's that its tentacles there's all sorts of kind of things in there so I do think that that that asked the family quiz show probably provided an early lesson to me in about thinking about making selections I've also long been fascinated by the fact that nature is fractal fractal basically means that it exhibits self similarity at different scales that patterns repeat there was a book by James Glick called chaos which was published on the Ignite in the late 1980s 1987 or something and reading it I was astonished to find the deep truths about how nature functions that could be expressed in in the mathematical formulas in fact chaos theory sensitive dependence on initial conditions and which is quite often expressed as a butterfly flaps its wings in Beijing and we get a typhoon or something or whatever no no not typhoons down under well are they typhoons yes they are and they I'll shut up now Tim might my meteorologist friend that all of these amazingly simple you could express these these things as simple formulas and by iteration by repeating them over and over again you could build up complex views of the world so as we zoom in on this fern you see the repetition and then you also see other little fellow travelers in there I've always loved this this little quote here from August to Morgan or gustas tu' Morgan so this was tongue-in-cheek he wrote the budget of paradoxes it's a kind of refutation in various people's false views of reality but even then so with mid 19th century there was a there was a sense of the complexity of reality and and that we knew only a fraction of what under lay the surface of reality so still self similarity is something that works really well in photographs the repetition of forms rhythm already helps to make a an image work and also it's about the overlooked details it's about what jars so in this case it's about the the single opening who knew that that is called the eye of a Creole there you go as a yeast and not the Easter speck to add to my huge number of useless facts but that to me is what makes the picture you've got all these forms repeating and then you have this this break you have the ropes you have the chaos sort of jumbling of the of the of the Creoles themselves and I'm constantly looking out for those overlooked minor details so it's no surprise in a way that you get self-similarity with men made objects because they are manufactured as simul crumbs of each other but you also have coarse get self similarity in someone like a forest this is a woodland at the back of Senen Cove in Cornwall and I'd never actually seen any photographs of this I'm guessing the reason I'd never seen any photographs of this is because sin encode itself is pretty compelling place to make a picture so people go down there and they go oh well I'm going to photo off the waves because they're amazing I'm not gonna look in that wood at the back because there can't be anything in there a lot of the time I find on with workshops the problem is to persuade people to look at something other than what they used to photographing to go and look at the overlooked rather than the the usual so the fractal nature of Woodlands means that there is something every scale through there but of course you need to reveal some form you need to make something that makes it pleasing as a photograph you know in this case it's about seeing trees for the wood instead of the wood for the trees or whichever waiver in that phrase goes so what motivates me to make photographs I think it's really comes from this quote from miner white it's about being in that contemplative space where I'm receptive to whatever I come across I don't I don't ever really go out with the plan when I'm going to make a picture all I'm doing is I'm wandering around pretty much aimlessly what was the phrase that you said Joe you said something similar that your practice was chaotic yeah and trying to be as receptive as possible to to whatever I come across and it's only when I'm in that state of mind that I can really be receptive to what's out there as seemingly ordinary as mundane so to be in a state where I can see the grass trapped in the meniscus of a flooded wood and find that fascinating and beautiful or to notice the detail of the killed over iris leaf and the conversation it seems to be having with the other one or to see the fence lost in the reeds or the gold leaf left behind by the falling sea to be receptive enough to sort through the chaos of a beach in the Hebrides and to find the chance conjunction of curved rocks and billion-year-old strata no stones were moved in the making of this photograph to look at what I'm standing on rather than out to the horizon - noticed the track of a snail foraging and salt with Bay this was very interesting a friend of mine who studied geology said oh you found I've never heard this word spoken so if I pronounce it incorrectly I apologize you found Fotini near which apparently a fossilized remains of an animal's eating so a snail moving through sand and leaves a track behind it when that's fossilized that's what it's called I said no no no was a live snail that was just moving across the surface receptive enough to stand in a shack in a ghost town in Montana and to look at the linen on the wall and wonder about the person who put it there and why they put it there to keep out the biting wind to watch the sunlight skim across the bed of an ephemeral river and illuminate the relics of the last flood that passed this way many months before so notice the intriguing beauty in corrugated plastic siding on a road Depot in Nevada as my friend Bob in the audience would say to see the beauty in Wrigley tin to ignore the pounding surf and watch the fading light as the water sinks back into the sand behind the retreating wave to find a barbed wire nest in Montana and wonder how it came to be there to see a face in a forest Shack in Georgia amid the twisted geometry to look at an empty house in Arizona and think about the stories that the owners long departed might have told about their life there receptive enough to watch the light retreat across a rough shod wall and wait to that moment when it just eliminates the wooden hasp receptive enough to see the possibilities in all of these and not to overlook any of them thank you very much

Channel: On Landscape

Views: 16,379

Keywords: +Joe cornish, +landscape photography, +photography, +creativity

Id: PW8cPcogNYE

Length: 34min 29sec (2069 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 07 2019