Thursday 16 June 2016

Landscapery

With a lot of time to kill last Friday I took a camera for a walk - mostly in the rain as it turned out.Try as I might I just couldn't get into the swing of photography. That was probably because of the radio jammed to my ear providing Test Match commentary...

While wandering around  a wood I did get sort of inclined to take some pictures and maybe return at a later date to make more in a similar vein to the ones I made for my Out of Stone project. But as my wanderings progressed my ides shifted. In places it looks undisturbed, wild and completely natural, despite a sign outlining the history of the place as a quarry and it's replanting around a hundred years ago.


Another sign has icons showing the various prohibited activities, which it was obvious are ignored. Although maintained as a public amenity, and kept tidy, there were traces of unsanctioned human activity all around. These traces were what I found most interesting. So much for thinking about the place in terms of traditional  landscape pictures. If I was going to make pictures in the wood they'd be looking at the ways people leave their mark on the place. Both from the management of the environment and the impacts from the public.


The road back from the wood to 'civilisation' is a fascinating location that would provide plenty of material for the theme of privacy and paranoia that I have on a slow burner. Electrically controlled gates, keep out signs. It has it all. If the rain hadn't been falling I would have taken more photographs there. I loved the way someone felt that two keep out signs were required in the scene below! Maybe I will return...


These pictures are about as close as I get to landscape photographs. I never feel that showing a pleasant scene is enough. I always get the urge to make some kind of, often obscure, comment. Except when I'm fishing when the sun setting seems to say plenty about the sense of place and time of day.


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