Book has shipped

I’m so pleased to finally ship my new book ‘The Sound of Snow’. I was very happy with last year’s production ‘Hálendi’, and this year’s production is up to the same quality.

I had always planned to do this book on Hokkaido, but I thought it would be a few years before it was out. I had not anticipated that a pandemic would halt my workshops, and send my business into nose dive.

The sound of Snow was accelerated, because I had the free time to work on it.

I have been very fortunate to have a large portfolio of images to rely on, and although producing a book does not make me rich, it has helped contribute to keeping me afloat. I am aware that for many of my workshop participants, they do not understand the economics of my business model, but suffice to say that I wasn’t sure I could get to 18 months of lockdowns, travel restrictions, and still be here.

This book has become more important to me than I would have ever thought. So I would like to thank those of you who bought a copy.

I have also received some lovely emails this week from some of the buyers of the book who have now received their copy. This is just great to hear, as each book project is always fraught with problems. When the book finally arrives I am always holding my breath to see if the production quality is up to what I had asked for, and this book is certainly there.

Comments so far:

What a beautiful book! Just wanted to say thank you for your obvious efforts in compiling such an inspirational book. Beautifully thought out and presented. Wonderful attention to detail and in my humble opinion, your best book so far. Excited to hear about the retrospective!

Neil Brayshaw

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New book arrived today and the printers have done a great job - beautiful photography and publication.

Euan Ross

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Hi Bruce hope you are well just to let you know i received you latest book today and must say the pictures are beautiful and really like your minimalist capture.

David Gaunt

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Just to thank you for the safe delivery of my book. Absolutely over the moon with it! 

Charlie Robinson

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Dear Bruce,

Your book arrived yesterday and I love the pictures, especially considering the conditions you must have faced. Thank you also for sending it so well packaged – much appreciated 

Best Regards,

Chris Chate

Iceland Air

So Iceland air cancelled my flights earlier this summer, with no explanation and offered me a ‘credit voucher’, and in very small text ‘ask for a refund’. I went through the ‘ask for a refund bit’, but found the website took me in a loop which took me back to the voucher acceptance stage. So I tried to contact them via their online chat thing - it doesn’t work. A month later it still doesn't work. So then I tried phone - waited over 40 minutes and gave up. Then I found a contact form, which I asked them for my money back. This was a month ago. I received nothing.

So today I finally get through to their staff on the phone and they tell me I accepted the credit voucher, which apparently has an expiry date, and once accepted, a refund is no longer possible (why not?). But I disputed that I had accepted the voucher. I never went anywhere near accepting it. And they’re not refunding me.

Last year on the way home form Iceland at the start of the pandemic (this was around March), instead of taking me back to Glasgow they dropped me off in Heathrow London. This was apparently for my own safety. My connecting flight home to Glasgow was via London city which is at the opposite side of London from where they dumped me. And I was supposed to pay for this myself and claim it back.

I will never use Iceland air again.

Retrospective

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.

Dream logic

David Lynch understands the intuitive aspect of creativity. He also understands the unconscious aspects of his audience, and how they respond when watching movies.

I think good artists intuitively know how to create work that has room for interpretation.

In a nutshell

All you need to know about creativity:

Trekking in Iceland

I’m in Iceland right now. I just completed walking the Lauavegur trail for the third time. It's been really good to come back to Iceland for my own mental health, and to take some weight off the constant Media pressure about the pandemic. Life, I was starting to forget, continues it seems.

So here is a picture of my tent on the second night of the trek. And before you ask, no I didn't put the stones around it it. They were already there 👍😊

A chat with Alister Benn

Thought you might like to watch my chat with Alister Benn. This is part one, and there will be more published.

Ego has no place in Creativity

As the Buddhist saying goes, to reach enlightenment, we have to lose the ‘i’, ‘myself’, ‘me’.

To create great art, I think we have to become a conduit for the art, rather than think of ourselves as the source.

This is the relationship I have with the work I create.

You can think of ego as a badly behaved monkey. It just wants instant gratification. It wants the adulation without the effort, and it also will get pretty upset if others do not like the work. The monkey’s opinion of itself and esteem are far more important than the work. It is like the tail wagging the dog, or putting the cart before the horse.

I have said many times that objectivity allows us to be appropriately critical of our work. To be objective, we have to be able to ‘stand outside ourselves’, and view the work as a 3rd-person might. This skill is present not just in the creation of art, but in most people’s jobs who do their jobs well. The art of being able to self-assess and figure out what is lacking and what needs to be worked on is part of self-development. And this is hard because in psychology studies, it has been found that most people tend to overestimate their abilities.

By removing the ego, we allow ourselves to let go. Letting go is the only way that creativity may flow. To remove judgement before the work is complete is in my view, essential. You can hone and shape the work, and of course there is a degree of control involved in this aspect, but by controlling the work too much, the flow of creativity will slow and halt. Too many rules, too many constrictions will lead to something that is contrived.

So we have to let go. We have to experiment. And by letting go, we allow the work to go anywhere. We also allow for the work to fail as well as succeed. Because by definition, experimentation means that we do not know what the outcome will be.

Ego is also highly coupled to the ideas of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. I rarely meet anyone who is not overly judgemental of their own work, and either spends time comparing what they did to their best work (self-comparison, and self-judgement), or to others. Rather than just saying ‘the work is what it is’, and understanding that we have an ebb and a flow to our creativity, and our work will vary, and that ‘this is completely normal and ok’, we exert judgement over what we do.

One question I am often asked is ‘how many successful images do you get on a roll of film?’ I used to try to turn the question around in the hope that the issuer of the question is forced to think about what motivated them to ask it in the first place. Because understanding one’s own motivation behind the questions we ask, can teach us a lot about how we view the subject we are discussing.

The language we use, and our choice of words can tell us so much about our selves and our relationships to the external world.

Sure I understand that for many, they just want to understand if my abilities and level of craft are above average, but this still ends up being a judgement, and expectation that some work is better than others and also, that the aim may be to reduce the ‘duds’ in the rolls of film down to just ‘successes’.

The answer I give is: ‘everything I do is a stepping stone to the next thing’. I cannot leap from one ‘successful’ image to another, and so, cutting out those in-between images would be pointless: they have to be made. They are just as important as the images we do want to keep.

With this understood, I believe that nothing is a failure. Everything teaches. You get to where you are from all the experiences you have: bad ones as well as good ones, and so the same is true in photography.

And it is for this reason, that we should try to eradicate the concepts of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ from our own internal language. We have to remove the monkey. We have to let go of our ego.

By doing so, we become free to see where creativity will take us.

More Standard Editions available

Just to let you know that we ordered a few more standard editions of my new Hokkaido book, which ships this September.

The standard edition comes as a light blue cloth hardback edition.

I’ve received some advanced copies now to check over and I’m delighted with the quality of the reproductions and the overall production.

It is similar in production values to last year’s Hálendi book :-)

I also have a few of the deluxe editions left - around 10 copies. This is the same book, but this time, we’ve printed it with a snow white cloth jacket, comes with a white cloth slipcase, and also includes one of three prints that you can choose from (see below).

The book is shipping this September.

Quiet

I’m sorry if the output on this has been sporadic. It’s just the way it is.

I often think that anyone who does not write a blog, or does not produce content, is blissfully ignorant to the pressures that anyone who does, has.

The blog is not dead. It’s not that I’m not interested. It’s just that there’s not much going on at the moment.

I can’t get out with my camera much, and the summer is here, so I am busy doing other things that are non-photo related: cycling, reading books, enjoying the summer sunlight, and writing music.

Just now is not a time for photography for me (sorry).

But rest assured, my blog is not dead…. yet. And I do intend to return. But only when I have something I feel is of value to say.