Category: Mother River

Assignment 2: Research and inspiration

Having struggled with the audio of Clarrie Wallace’s talk prior to the opening of Richard Long’s ‘Heaven and Earth’ exhibition at Tate Britain in 2009, I was pleased to find the book accompanying the exhibition in my local university library. As well as being, to my mind, more accessible than Long’s website, it also includes a lengthy section by Clarrie Wallace, curator of the exhibition, artist’s statements from a number of his earlier exhibitions and the transcript of an interview with Michael Craig-Martin, all of which make fascinating reading.  I find this quite a strange book though.  The text pieces of Long’s work are interspersed with photographs and for some reason I found them much more meaningful when presented in that way. The reason this is strange is because the text pieces bear no relationship to the images they are placed next to. Perhaps it works because by the time I got to pages of text describing a walk, I was beginning to have a better understanding of what makes Richard Long tick.

There are several things that came out of this book and Richard Long’s work that have influenced my assignment two journey.  In his introductory chapter, ‘Walking Abroad’, Nicholas Serota talks of Long ‘touching the earth lightly and rarely crossing the same path‘ (Serota, 2009:28) The same can’t be said for me because I have already made a practice run of this journey simply for the purpose of working out the technical aspects and deciding what I could and couldn’t do. I do realise of course that you often don’t get a second chance and I guess you lose some of the mystery and randomness by practicing in advance.  There is certainly a randomness about Long’s work but at the same time there are rules. Clarrie Wallace talks about a six day hitchhiking trip he made to the summit of Ben Nevis and ‘at 11am every day, he took two photographs? For one photograph he pointed to camera straight up at the sky and for the other, he pointed it straight down to the ground’ (Wallace, 2009:43)  Wallace also reminded me of Albert Einstein’s 4th dimension being time, something that Long tries to incorporate in his work. I hadn’t thought of this in terms of photography before but it helped me decide how I will approach my work, for example by using a slow shutter speed to blur the images and show movement and the passing of time.

Yan Wang Preston is a photographer I have followed since hearing her talk about her Mother River Project at a meeting of the RPS Contemporary Group about 18 months ago.  The project covers a journey she made to track and photograph the Yangtze river from its source in the Tibetan plateau to its mouth in the East China Sea. Preston measured the river into 100km sections using Google Maps, which she named Y points and undertook to photograph at each of the 63 points regardless of cost or difficulty. Over a five year period she made numerous journeys; in some cases the locations were only accessible for about 2 weeks of the year and one section had to be re-shot because she had loaded the film into her 5 x 4 plate camera the wrong way – 2 of the accidents are included in the project.  Like Richard Long, Yan Preston set herself some rules, which in her case included:

  • she would not photograph any iconic sites
  • she would not photograph any pollution
  • she would only photograph at the  pre-determined Y points

I have followed Preston and Long’s example in my project by setting myself some rules although with hindsight I may have over complicated things and made the project more difficult to manage.

Whilst studying the typlologies and topographies section of the materials, I was struck by Lewis Baltz‘s reason for taking the photographs he did; urban wastelands, industrial sites, ordinary housing estates, areas that I learned from Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts book, were known as Edgelands. Baltz took these photographs because these places are ‘common place and ordinary’ (Baltz,2012), nobody seemed to be interested in taking photographs of what was all around them.

Todd Hido covers a range of different genre in his work from portraits to found objects but it was his ‘Landscape’ portfolio that interested me most.  The photographs are quite varied in terms of subject; buildings, fields, roadways, railtracks, but the thing that stands out most for me is that many, if not most, are shot in bad weather. Whether from a vehicle with water on the windscreen or raindrops on the camera lens, I don’t know but it certainly adds to the atmosphere of the photographs.

Although I was able to find artists who used journeys to influence their work, it was less easy finding photographers who photographed rail journeys, the two exceptions being Paul Fusco and Rolf Sachs.

Paul Fusco was one of more than a dozen photographer accompanying Robert Kennedy’s body to its resting place but the only one who photographed the crowds paying their respects as the as the funeral train passed by.  I wondered at the relevance of Fusco’s photographs compared to mine because our aims were different.  Whilst I have used a slow shutter speed to blur the landscape, Fusco wanted to capture the emotion of the crowds and there is therefore more detail.  The train, I imagine, moved mores slowly and health and safety must also have been a consideration because people were everywhere, including standing on the tracks.

By contrast, I found Rolf Sachs project, “Camera in Motion – From Chur to Tirano”, very relevant to my assignment as his aim in the first place, apart from promoting Leica Cameras, was to photograph the journey.  Taken over the course of a year, Camera in Motion, according to Sachs’ website, ‘blurs the boundaries between abstract art and landscape photography’ (Sachs, 2013).  I guess this explains my slight unease with my own images, certainly in terms of landscape photographs, as my usual style is to try to get my photographs as sharp as possible.  In the short video on his website, Sachs talks about adding a different dynamic because the camera is static in the moving train, so that you have an added layer of interest in the blurring of the trees and people waiting at the stations and at the same time very small areas of sharpness.  As wells as blurred trees and landscape as the train passes through, Sachs’ photographs include sections of railway line and the train’s window frame, all of which gave me confidence that my own images were perhaps not as far off the mark as I had originally feared. The other thing that puts my work and that of other OCA students into context is that in order to get the  87 photographs for the book which accompanied the series, Sachs took in the region of 15000 photographs over a 12 month period. (Sachs, 2014) I think this emphasises the challenge we have in aiming for 12 acceptable photographs from a shoot of possibly 200 in one or two short journeys.

Browsing through Rolf Sachs website I found another two projects which I found very interesting and quite relevant. The first was Amazon Express, 2007, in which all of the photographs were taken from by a camera attached to the hull of a boat by the same name. According the Sachs’ website, ‘ The camera captured an image every ten minutes, creating a wealth of unexpected photographs, capturing fleeting moments of water and light. (Sachs, 2007) The other project is entitled Wilder Kaiser, or Wild Emperor, 2004 where a photograph was taken of the same view of the Wild Kaiser mountains in the Austrian Tyrol, every 10 minutes and 31 seconds, from 1st of January until 31st of December 2004. The resulting 47739 photographs show the same scene in different lights, different seasons, different weathers, different moods. I hate to think about how long it took to process and edit that number to come up with the final selection for the resulting book!

The above research has influenced my assignment in the following ways:

  • Rather than only taking photographs when the train in stationary and/or trying to freeze the movement with a fast shutter speed, I have embraced the movement of the train and taken my photographs with a slower shutter speed than originally planned, thus producing intentionally blurred photographs.
  • Apart from the first and last, the starting point and destination, all of the photographs were be taken at regular intervals so that there was a randomness to the images
  • Both Richard Long and Yan Wang Preston used maps as part of their artwork and it is my intention to include a map of the journey taken from Google Earth as well as a National Rail timetable
  • All of the photographs were taken from the same seating position in the train and with the same focal length which means that the train’s window frame and sections of the track are included in some of the photographs.

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