I’m acutely aware that if one has an audience, that audience are always one step behind you. One of the best ways to illustrate that point is with my photographic books. Books are always based on the past. They can never be an illustration of where you are right now.
In my own case, the last three books I’ve published have been planned for about five years. We knew we were going to do Altiplano, Hálendi and then Sound of Snow. In that order.
This had always been the plan except the last two books came out rather quickly because I had the free time this past year to focus on the design of them. Had it not been for the pandemic, both Hálendi and The Sound of Snow would probably still be vapourware, and so when they would have finally become physical objects, the images within them would be even older than they are now.
This is just a ‘placeholder’ image. This is not the design or intended cover of any retrospective book I end up making.
So in this way, photographic books are always historical. They are a statement of past events.
I am now up to date: the cupboard is now empty of ‘completed projects’.
Which brings me on to thinking about a retrospective. A book that will cover the last decade or so since I ‘went professional’ for want of a better term.
I don’t just want to do a book that has a collection of images only. I’m more interested in telling a story.
So I think the book will try to convey the development and progress of my imagery over the past 10 years.
I’m very aware that certain landscapes have been teachers. And that in order to photograph one kind of landscape, I had to do my homework elsewhere first. I could not have known how to approach the black deserts of Iceland if I had not photographed the Altiplano of Bolivia first. Similarly, I could not have known how to develop my photographs in winter landscapes had it not been for working on luminosity / tonality in the black deserts of Iceland. My Japan imagery was built on top of my experiences of working in the vast black deserts of Iceland. And so on…..
So this is where I think I would like to take such a book. A chronology of epiphanies perhaps. As I often think that if one is developing, there are often times when we hit a new level of awareness, where things come together and begin to make sense.
Thinking this way, and realising that the whole thing is a path of progression, I can’t help but come to the realisation that every point that has come before, has been taking me to where I am right now.