Joe Cornish - Overlooked

thanks very much everyone thank you David it's one of the reasons that this talk has this name is that when David and I first started working together I was always flummoxed by how he could turn upper places and make amazing pictures with apparently never having done any photography for the previous three months and whereas I have always laboured away needing to repeat myself a lot and so in fact I think even David would concede that that actually practice doing it is there's no real substitute for that and fundamentally that's what this talk is about some people need to practice more than others and I probably count as one of those people who needs to practice a lot so I'm going to move swiftly into it and this is the last egotistical picture that you will see here but I thought it was worth showing so you did for several reasons not the least of which is that every single camera in these pictures of me shooting is different and I I thought oh this is good I've managed to show every kind of photographic hiatus I get myself into including hand-holding until I realized that actually I am indeed on top of a tripod here as well so there's clearly a kind of theme of preference for being a tripod kind of wielding photographer in general but I must admit that I do even handhold the camera from time to time to sign so everyone here takes pictures I know and so that none of these themes is in you but but what are the the point I really want to make is that the kind of part of the paraphernalia of photography is important whether we like it or not we use these instruments and we need to practice them and practice them and practice them and these these technical skills form the basis of craft like any other craft being able to make cabinets or make sculptures or pots or indeed music being able to use the tools of your trade in a way that's coherent and and reasonably connected and then there's more and this is the other side of photography if you will what you could call photographic seeing and whether we have an intern to purpose we we all have to deal with aesthetic theory and practice whether or not we think of it that way many of us worry about storytelling narrative we feel we need to express ourselves and interpret the world around us and in that process we have to analyze what we do and critical evaluation and feedback perhaps from our peers and also from ourselves is a very important part of that process and these could roughly speaking be lumped into this section right called art and soul they're not separate from crafts but they are a distinctive aspect of it all of these skills I think require practice and in many ways a lot of that is simply repetition so I'm going to run through just a few examples of how repetition might manifest itself sometimes in my case it means literally almost copying myself and that's pure curiosity sometimes I'll go back to a location like this one Pavlik gorge in a lake in the java shopping district and and I can't find a better composition than no one I shot back in the day so and it's actually kind of cool to see how in various ways things have changed and then perhaps they haven't changed as much as you might think given that so many years have passed these trees haven't actually changed that much in their size and proportion and their relationship the Quran in sky which I'm sure all of you will have have been to one of the most beautiful landscapes on those dramatic landscapes in the UK back in 2005 and here just last last year same time of day I've adopted a very slightly different position but in many ways the spirits of the picture is it's quite similar these this sequence of three has made Kelly cranky last autumn and is separated only by a few days I've repeated the composition because I couldn't make a composition that I preferred from this position and it's actually quite instructive to see how in this case of repetition how only over the course of a couple of weeks the landscape in its kind of delicacy and d-flat detail can change so much now all of this practice began for me back in the 1980s as a travel photographer and I was really really really lucky I didn't realize it at the time I just thought I was making a living but in a late 1980s to get Commission's doing travel books and what that really involved was putting the camera on a tripod and taking it down again making pictures in the mean time over and over again hundreds and hundreds and actually thousands of times and that repetition was really really helpful for me my back yard is it words Rosebery chopping not too far from here below or above the village of great Aten where we live and and it's a place that I know and love and it's not really so much that Rose berry topping itself matters it does it's a focal point in a distance but the landscape around it that I'm interested in and using using Rose barriers a kind of signature feature of the of the landscape but it's not only going to the same places and repeating ideas it's really about getting to know the landscape and our crafts our photography by repetition and and in some ways it's more than that it's also about understanding how that translates into the photographs that we see so what I've done next is to look at how landscapes themselves might be considered and I was for well I wasn't that surprised but I'm what I discovered when I looked through my my archive was that actually the majority of my work probably fell into this category the intimate landscape but I also realized that this category is very very wide and I'd like to sort of characterize it in many ways as being both creative and also not so creative if you like this picture for example which is shot in Tasmania you could easily describe as a flat artwork copy what is the outcome it comes from nature itself and this is the idea behind that kind of work where it's other images this picture is made in the Lake District in June when David and I were leading a workshop require a little bit more imagination a little bit more luck and and also a little bit more timing one of the things that is critical in intimate landscape photography is the color of life itself sometimes the light is very overcast which lends itself to particular types of image this is a pond in a parkland landscape in the Midlands shot for a book on capability brown it's hard to tell what the surfaces and the depths are to a large extent down to the reflections of light well this is in a sense and again there's an ambiguity here for me about the space and what we're actually looking at we're actually looking water behind this bush branch but it's the ambiguity that gives it for me gives it depth and engagement very much as Lizzie was talking about earlier and same in fact the colour of light is a critical part of our photography and and this is in the intimate landscape is an area that it's possible to really explore what that means this picture for me is interesting on a couple of grounds one is that it's not that successful from my point of view because it looks staged even though I don't think it was and yet it shows two particular types of color of ambient daylight but also native color the native color is the leaf itself the colors that you see on this and burnt our tree are actually the reflection of the blue sky and the reflection of the world's largest cliff El Capitan in Yosemite and this picture was the one that really taught me and consolidated me in my practice the idea of the color of light and what a critical role it plays first in our photography and how it can be how it can be harnessed to create depth and mood the blue from the sky the goal from reflections of cliffs just outside the image area the previous picture actually helped me probably in compositions like this but this picture has no such complex lighting it's rather overcast lights here but it brings me into another thought process of intimate photography which is around how we as humans reference the human body and the gesture and expression of the human body and indeed of animals as we look at the world around us if you look carefully at your own hand you might see a reference here sometimes intimate landscapes reference other landscapes quite often pictures made from a very short working distance might appear to have been made from a great height sometimes they might reference a fusion of things from the imagination and one of the great things about ice as a as a theme is that it's so infinitely changing so whenever we photograph ice is an exciting moment because you know it's not going to last the returned past this puddle in the track an hour and a half later and there was no ice there sometimes the imagination itself is what drives the process almost completely and here I was just looking to push myself to see if I could use the Setting Sun and the seaweed together in some interesting way and I think again it's the the gesture or the expression of the human figure that has a reference point here now intimate landscapes can take more kind of mundane appearances as well and woodland is a wonderful theme for many of us in this room I know and so I love I love photographing woodland sometimes it has a fairly obvious a kind of idea as here with the matura trees mainly larch in the background and the small birch in the foreground and that youth and relative old age is is one that I'm sure that we can all relate to on one level or another sometimes it's just purely the magic of the moment aspen trees are essentially all related to one another they all share the thing same DNA generally in a grove like this and the thought that this is fundamentally one organism is it's hard to escape when I look at that picture but we also see the understory it's different different trees here a different type but it's also the snow and the color for simple monochrome values of the light that bring it together this is actually Avery and these are beaches and for me these these immediately suggest nerve endings of or it may be a spinal column or something around those sorts of themes and I just find it fascinating that trees can imply or suggest so much to us this is actually back in paddling Gorge again in February this year on the face of it not a very promising time or indeed like to be out in in woodland it's extremely chaotic it's it's a for me very exciting to try to make pictures where on the face of it it shouldn't be possible to make pictures because how do you compose such chaotic elements together and those wonderful seeing Lizzie's pictures earlier particularly because I just could relate to the challenges that she says herself so intimate landscapes can also for me describe the wider landscape that's where the emphasis is on probably more on the foreground and and yet bringing its context to life by including the space beyond it I always like the idea that you can photograph a mountain and yet make the picture of of a blade of grass in the foreground and that actually in some ways it's the grasses and the decaying matter in the pond here and the little rocks and roots and so on which which are actually the kind of star of the of the idea this picture in particular is one that I like because it was made in the kind of light that I hate which is blue skies with no clouds and absolute impossibility in the UK and especially in Scotland isn't it well maybe it isn't so because if there's enough shadow around it's sometimes possible to combine the virtues of shadow which mean the preservation of frost and snow with those areas that now have early morning sunlight where the frost and snow main burned off but which has that rich red and orange of the Scottish landscape in the distance and finally in this series although this is a on the face of it of Vista for me it's the intimate interplay of the lily pads and their serpentine stems in the foreground that make this picture and I wouldn't have made the picture if it weren't for the lily pads so here's another possible theme for a landscape the geographic landscape in I've just got a few examples of this and the idea here really is it's that I'd always like my pictures to express something but I know an awful lot all the time they don't so I'm asking myself well do they still have a purpose and I still think they do and I'm quite interested in the idea of landscape photography is geography as the record for future generations of now the here and now what does the landscape look like so here we have pictures that are described in a palatable and pleasing way the landscapes at a certain moment in time they may not be a huge attempt at expression or metaphor but they do represent the facts as you can see them if you go out into the landscape and there is a beauty in that as well or there may be that may be what drove the intent to make the photograph in the first place but I will readily concede that the primary kind of virtue of these pictures if they have any is they provide geographic information and I don't think there's anything wrong in that most of you will recognize these places to Cornwall a bit further back the runs and then the last one is also otter this is this is actually in the shot show Hills of course it would be nice if these pictures also in some ways distilled or epitomized those landscapes this is Lands End and to Norway quarry Snowden in the background almost certainly on another workshop with David so most of them are or Roseberry topping local landscape and very often all of these pictures have been shot in the landscape formats and some of them are relatively panoramic and and maybe that's that's in keeping with the nature of a geographic focus in a landscape but here we have an exception this is Australia the top Mount Sterling and I like this picture but I realize that ultimately its main virtue is to describe this landscape with its granite tours its burnt-out eucalyptus trees in a distance this white here isn't this is shot in late summer and so this is not snow it's actually the where wildfire has run through this landscape about five years previously and that for me is part of its Geographic interest the iconic landscape well everybody knows Death Valley and this is Toledo one of the first places which I photographed I suppose with a strong sense of reference because it's the home of El Greco the great Greek Spanish painter who is a revolutionary of the Spanish Renaissance and he painted he painted Toledo his what became his adopted hometown from this is exact point so for me as his exciting picture to make but it's because its iconic that I've included it in this section Venice of course its iconic but what is it about iconic landscapes what should we be doing as photographers when we come across places that are extremely familiar recognizable to tuscan landscape for example i think it's a great challenge i think it's an opportunity to try to think differently tuscany we always associate with blue skies and sunshine probably so this is in overcast and rain beachy head doesn't get much more iconic than that in the english landscape this picture it's not one I'm particularly fond of but I think it's interesting because of the the long exposure which you'd say oh it creates a sort of milky impression well yes it does but the reason that the water is that color is actually the chalk in the water so if you made a short exposure it would still be very bright or white and very opaque because of the incredible amount of chalk and other and iconography comes in different forms this is that Mary's lighthouse in Northumberland but it's also a landscape of a lighthouse lighthouses themselves iconic in lots of ways bamburgh castle as we all know looks best from the northwest except this is from the southeast myyy fetch the right pronunciation in Iceland is to me epitomizes a volcano it's a very small volcano but a volcano nonetheless and where I was the lucky I guess to make my own kind of image something that means something to me here is simply the the repetitions in the composition and then I got lucky with this little cloud which echoes the shape of the sandbar in the foreground Ellen Ternan in Scotland is the most photographed icon in Scotland after edinburgh castle by all accounts so it's quite fun to try to find an alternative viewpoint of it and the English Lake District is iconographic in its own right and this particular view for me evokes and reminds me of James W Turner who is definitely an iconic English painter this is very much the kind of light he would have liked or what about Yosemite that most iconic of all global landscapes most of us including me have made our pictures of it from the Gateway to the valley and from tunnel view but this picture was made from just outside not the park itself but outside the valley where I climbed up a long granite slab high up onto the distance where I could see both El Capitan and Half Dome and in the distance and it's shot at Twilight it wasn't great light but it was it was exciting to find such familiar scenes but from an unfamiliar place and I like to think of this as the Pride Rock from The Lion King it isn't of course but it is the Drakensberg Anfisa a very amazing and iconic landscape so the grand Vista sometimes pejoratively named by a colleague of mine it's still something that people enjoy photographing and and still has a purpose but due to the fact that it's it's so popular I've only included two and it's really there's very little difference in some ways between these grand vistas and the geographic landscape but there was a slight difference in emphasis for me and I just wanted to to mention this possible theme a way of thinking about landscape as another alternative but here's an area where many of you have definitely works and enjoyed making photographs and whether you've thought of it this way or not I'm not so sure but this is sublime this is really a 18th century late 18th century early 19th century concept and it it was a driving force behind painting back then and in terms of photography it can best be seen I guesses as the landscapes that are majestic and grand and/or inspiring awesome awesome I believe as the Americans would describe it and and they these are places a great beauty and impressive but what makes them sublime as opposed to simply picturesque is the conditions because what's wrapped up in the notion of the sublime is the threatening the dangerous the the life-endangering and so for us as photographers we can sometimes touch on the sublime when we see these mighty landscapes and they're being they're being illuminated by storm lights or particularly challenging weather conditions and and so it's a kind of category which which arises out of the conditions that that were in I think there's a few of you here who were with me when I made this picture in Glencoe a couple of years ago with a snowstorm coming down the Glen and this is on the sky screwing us tree pretending to be a volcano it's literally a cloud burst over over there that was really an unbelievable so I don't lasted a couple of minutes probably of all the sublime landscapes I've been in I think in many ways this is the most obvious example because when you walk underneath this is two or three hundred ton Boulder you are in theory putting your life at risk one of these days it's going to fall hopefully not on you and it's picture always reminds me of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark if any of you remember that scene and this is from a very recent tour in Greenland and I think that perhaps of all my experiences of the sublime this is probably the most visceral and I should give a fellow traveler Niccolo credit for this little phone sequence because she shot this and not me but I think you'll see why seeing this amazing arched iceberg a thing of extraordinary beauty and majesty was also pretty terrifying if you've been in the wrong place so now you can understand why when you're out in a Zodiac you should never go too near an iceberg especially an arched Berg this wave did come towards the ship and the skipper had to turn the ship to water to make sure that that wealth basically that everything didn't fly everywhere it was a very very interesting experience on walls foregrounds so sublime also includes for me extraordinary moments of beauty and kind of power in nature this is the first my first glimpse of Antarctica back in 2013 this is south shetland island thing snow and glassy is coming down to the sea and the most amazing extraordinary sunrises fantastic and and here's another example this is a storm at sunrise over valley of the gods in utah and here's an example of a picture I'd like to make sublime but haven't managed to yet this is on the top of glitter in Snowdonia Snowden in a far distance here and this is called the temple of all the fortress of the four winds I forget now but I'm sure a few of you have been up there and seen it and to me it's it's the most terrifying thing to look at in the imagination these sharp razor like blades of rock projecting up to the sky and for that reason it's majestic and exciting to photograph and it is truly sublime in that sense but I just need to get up there when there's a big lightning storm breaking over the top of it maybe I'll get my picture there one day the altered landscape is is an area that if you're if you live in the UK it's a very productive theme because there's so many nearly all of our landscape is altered in one way or another but particularly landscapes altered by industry are fascinating to me they seem very conflicted they're often quite ugly but also they have a kind of beautiful like ugliness and I think that the record steel works is a great example of that this is Iceland and there's a power station just behind this little Ridge here this is a crop ler I think and meeven and this is at Strathcona in scotland and really epitomizes how we treat woodland as a resource it's also kind of fascinating because the birches as so often are left the native trees left by the the foresters as kind of almost as sentinels to the past and the fact that you can see the pylons in the distance perhaps is it reinforces that that sense of a kind of I don't know I feel empty when I look at pictures like this but I think there is a point to making them a different kind of altered landscape is those altered by our ancestors thousands of years ago this is Avebury still still amazing to experience today or hadrian's wall or the dales this viaduct in Denton Dale is it's an absolutely landscape changing feature dominates it and it's not necessarily a bad thing but it is a kind of powerful icon of human occupation of the land as are these these mine buildings in Cornwall so again a slightly different theme but one which I guess that many of us might prefer to be working towards is a metaphoric landscape this is the sort of landscape where we are we are seeking more than just the appearance of things trying to say something trying to discover something in the way that we frame the view in front of us for me this will always be El Capitan slain which is a very odd concept but El Capitan the world's largest granite cliff face reflected not shown in the picture but reflected in the waters of the Merced River with its heart being speared by a by a fallen tree something very weird and strange about it and bourbon Hamner in Svalbard which is a picture that shot on that first trip that you and I did together back in 2013 I think now yeah a picture that I still I love and hate in equal measure showing the remains of tens of thousands of beluga bones where those beautiful whales were slaughtered on mass by our ancestors though this picture is just a fragment of a stream in the North York Moors near falling for us but where for me the rocks have partly as a result of a little bit of deliberate under exposure and contrast increase have become animated in a way that makes them slightly different to mere rocks back in Yosemite a dogwood rose defying this old tree stump on the left correct well tell that story later maybe or a picture that I made when I was with David back in 2002 in Skye yes in the middle of the summer yes but which is always represented represented for me the idea of of hope in darkness in more ways than one this picture was made in February of this year and it's of a Caledonian pine and Glen Afric and and in some ways it's a metaphor of the lone tree but it's not a lone tree I've long it rather objected to the idea of the lone tree because trees fundamentally thrive together as part of a community and and so here it's a lone tree and some of the graphic benefits of that a emphasize but it's also part of the woodland that lies beyond it and and this picture shot on shores of Loch Marie long exposure to simplify the water but also allows the tree to move during exposure so it has a kind of live writhing quality to it which is slightly sinister and if ever a picture is sinister in the landscape for me it's this one which it looks looks like that for me the Gateway to the underworld or Mordor or something is actually in Australia on man sterling and these eucalypts were all burned by wildfire well this is a slightly tongue-in-cheek metaphor but for the round bolded prefers a monkey that would definitely include myself it's actually shot on the wonderful island of egg looking towards rum and although I I do hate having the epithet JCB attached to my person I I cannot deny that I have a thing for round boulders well said just recently I've been lucky enough to travel widely and the mainly in the polar regions and so a landscape as habitat is something that's of great interest to me this is in Greenland musk ox and an increasingly starting to appreciate the wonders of seeing wildlife on location now as a kind of recovering large-format photographer I've never really thought I was the right kind of person to be photographing animals because usually they've gone long before I've finished setting up their camera but when you can actually hand hold a camera from a Zodiac and still get quite a sharp photograph there's something quite exciting and absolutely revealing about seeing animals in their habitat as a very important part of the landscape and just in case you're wondering where the animal is in this picture it's here and that is a Kittiwake and what you're looking at there is an iceberg and not just an iceberg but just the lower buttresses of an iceberg in Greenland humpback whale in shikaka in the Russian Far East and king penguins in South Georgia and these animals well they obviously inhabit these landscapes they also affect it and change it by their presence there and much of the impression that you have is not just at the Penguins but also of the animals that have been and died such as the rain remains of this whale vertebra in the foreground and just occasionally you get lucky with the spacing I promise no Photoshop was used to manipulate me absolutely and sometimes you even see human beings in their habitat so here's a photographer in his landscape so I'm going to have to move swiftly on landscape of memory this picture especially as a player I know in love and David and I have been here many times but it was Paul Wakefield actually who really inspired us both to discover this place and to keep returning past for the goats in Turin and so I remember Paul's photograph as I'm sure David does and it's part of our kind of own internal iconography and my own experience of the egg was will always be defined by this experience the very first day of seeing this view on egg in one of those rare magical and kind of rather elaborate sunsets that you'll only see once or twice a year this was for me back in 2003 my memories are very much influenced by my memory of painting as an art history student including to Turner and perhaps constable even more so and I always think of Constable and to a lesser extent of Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin when I when I look at that picture and this picture is actually very much informed by my great friend David Ward whose picture of wasps water from back in about 1992 I should think I found really inspiring and I've always wanted to make a picture that I loved as much as that one of yours and what's really quite pleasing for me about this photograph from was water is it the man himself is actually in the photograph by warming again sometimes memory is collective and the collective thoughts or idea of the North York Moors is of a heather moorland and so the Heather each summer is such an identifying part of it and I'll always be going out there another type of memory is the memory of the living industrial landscape the wreck of Steel works when it was still alive and still operational and these figures for me epitomize the sense of of Alfa Vita zone to red car well the memory might be my archive I found this transparency lurking among other transparencies a couple of weeks ago when I was looking through my collection and I thought it'd be fun to scan it and and see how it looked today or it could be the memory of photographers past we probably all think of Ansel Adams I guess when we look at this view of El Capitan but Ansel Adams himself was thinking of Carleton Watkins who got there before him and made a composition almost identical to this one I probably also think of Ansel Adams when I I look at this picture because this is one that was a really important moment for me and it is a homage to his great picture of Aspen's made in New Mexico and yet it's very very different to that so that was the landscape of memory but ultimately all attempts to categorize landscape must fail because all landscapes so it's as some extent or another probably a fusion of any one of those categories and so it made me reflect on my own practice which is well to put it politely Restless some might say completely chaotic but I actually just have to quote Lizzie's point curiosity for almost every landscape I just love photographing landscape doesn't matter where it is or in some ways what it is just that curiosity continues to drive me and I do believe that that the technical skill and the artistic design considerations and indeed your intent and philosophy ultimately cannot be separated they are all one and I do believe that the primary idea of practice is simple that when you are in practice then your photographic vision becomes instinctive I'm pretty sure everybody knows that quote so I won't repeat it I think Gary Player was usually attributed with it and actually in many ways this picture epitomizes that for me because I was saw this window in the trees last winter but winter before last I'd set up my camera carefully on my tripod and just tweaking the edge frame edges and his deer then just came and stood very obligingly for me and exactly the right gap I guess that my personal practice when I think about it is really this at the bottom of search for beauty and to be a voice for nature I would really be happy if I felt that my pictures could say something for nature itself and that would inspire us to protect it and to care for it and to see ourselves as part of it and to again to refer to a theme that both this young and Tim came to when we think about composition and mood and so on I I just can't be doing with rules so it's one thing I really believe is that is that rules of composition well they're not really made to be broken and more made to be ignored in my view but but of course there is a purpose chicken but for me these are the these are the things that matter these are the themes and not only are they important in photography but of course they're also vital in all the other arts I'm just gonna as I'm sure I've gone on far too long when I'm run quickly through a few pictures which I hope show connection for example relationship which refer to the figure the human figure the fundamental grounding of human aesthetics which are about mood and atmosphere relationship connection and and this picture was made about ten days ago and this picture was made about five minutes later so for me that's one of the interesting ways that photography itself is a transformative process just the shape of light and the presence of otherwise of sunlight and how things are transformed in that moment I did shift the camera slightly by the way if anyone's wondering as another lucky moments last week and also last week so these are from Colorado but I'm not afraid of complexity I love complexity and I see the landscape as very richly complex and trying to solve the jigsaw puzzle of landscape is part of the joy of it for me and practice in my home patch continuous this was just shot about six weeks ago and I think what that means by practice is that when you go somewhere completely unfamiliar like Greenland you have a framework of understanding and fundamentally what it all gets down to is this does the image have a life thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: On Landscape

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Id: R-G27Fdgx50

Length: 44min 46sec (2686 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 06 2019