New work from Torridon, Wester Ross, Scottish Highlands.

These images were made on two trips: my November workshop with a fantastic group of people, and on a private trip back in January to try to see if I could dig further below the surface.

I’ve had a long history with Torridon. Being one of three places I would visit as an amateur photographer back in the years 2000 to 2003, I had always felt there was something below the surface, something not so obvious, but it is there. This landscape does not offer up ‘postcard vistas’. It is a hard landscape to grasp, and I have often struggled here.

As my photography has developed over the years, I began to stray away from the Scottish Highlands. I had found simplicity elsewhere in Bolivia, Iceland and Hokkaido. It is with the current restrictions on our lives, that I have been forced to retract, and look locally.

The work is different from what I once captured here. I see traces of Hokkaido’s space and Iceland’s tonality. I don’t think it’s a progression of sorts at all: more like ‘This is what I do’. After so many years of what I felt was growth, I have an established style now perhaps.

I’m enjoying the return to my roots. I can’t say for sure that I feel I’m moving forward, as my instinct is to keep photographing far flung places. But as with all things in life : it is often in the unplanned, that great surprise awaits us, and it is often in the limit of options that we are forced into realms we thought we already knew, to find we did not know them at all.

If you haven’t figured this out yet, i’m enjoying this very much.