Low contrast mood

Sometimes, the colours in nature, are a bit more unnatural than we are used to seeing. Cameras record light linearly, but we see a compressed dynamic range. We also ‘filter out’ colour casts.

But I think there’s a place for low-mood, low-contrast work. It’s so easy to think that everything needs to live in a full tonal register from deep blacks and absolute whites. As much as I love high-key images, they don’t suit all subjects, and I think with this edit, the deliberate lower tonal registers add to the atmosphere and mood.

This image is slightly damaged - I’m unclear if it’s a light leak on my film back, or the processing. But that hasn’t stopped me from liking it. The Sepia tone - actually desaturated from the original transparency (I shoot film - Velvia 50), still looks a little ‘otherworldly’, which is exactly what I am aiming to do with most of my work.

Torridon Six

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.

dreamstates in every day moments

I think that is what photographs are. They have, for me, never been about reality. But rather, an internal world.

To freeze reality, is to make it unreal. It is to take fluid time passing moments, and pause them, because for many of us, a particular moment when the lighting and subject matter come together, it is as though they have been conspiring, have been heading toward this one single definitive moment.

I have always thought that photography is the process of interpretation. I create images that mean something to me, but I have no control whatsoever on how others will view my work, and neither should I expect to. Because the simple fact that everyone will get something different out of what I create, just proves my point that photographs are interpretive, and therefore subjective.

With that in mind, when we put our work out there, we have to accept that it becomes public property. We no longer have any control over it. If you find an original composition or landscape, others may wish to emulate it. And to tell others what the work is about, is in my view rather pointless. That choice is in the viewer’s hands.

That is when I came to realise that photography is interpretive. What I feel of my work, and what I think of it is just my own interpretation. What others see and feel, is entirely up to them.

Photography is not reality, and for me, it is not about capturing exactly what was there. This is one of the reasons why I love film. With different film stocks you get different looks to the work. Either it is a colour difference, or a contrast difference or perhaps both. I use Fuji Velvia for most of my landscape work. Fuji Velvia does not record accurate colour. More or less, each time I get the films back, it is like I am staring at images made in a parallel universe to the one I was photographing. I also love film grain because it ensures that the images aren’t hopefully considered to be ‘real’ or ‘verbatim’. Film has a tendency to roll off the highlights so they don’t hit a sudden wall. And lastly, I like to use film because I understand there will be a big disconnect between what I am seeing and what I am recording.

One other disconnect that I like, is that I have no preview screen, I have no way to preview how the images will look, except to build up an internal view in my mind’s eye. I do that by metering the scene with a spot meter. I am able to figure out where each tone in the scene sits in relation to each other. This allows me to connect to an inner-world. A sort of dream state where the image resides.

Photography is purely interpretive, and because each person sees something different in my work, I have come to the conclusion that making photographs is a personal thing. I am doing it for myself.

I realised a long time ago, that it’s important for me to explore my inner world, because that is where I dream, and I like to think that all of my finished images are really a representation of those inner dreams.

Anonymity

I remember many many years ago, I was browsing Paul Wakefield’s stunning work on his website. None of the photographs had titles, or any explanations as to where they had been made, and although I was not consciously aware of it, this seemed to increase my attention to each image.

In Paul’s portfolio, he had a shot of an unrecognised lake in Patagonia. I was so sure it was Torres del Paine national park (a place I feel I know pretty well), but I could not figure it out. So I wrote to him to ask if I was right in assuming the photograph in question was in the actual park. I must stress that I was not looking for the same exact spot, or location. It had just stumped me that here was a photograph of a place I thought I knew well, and yet the lake looked completely alien to me.

Paul wrote back and he did what I think all artists should do: ask a question in reply to a question (I paraphrase here because it was so long ago, but his reply was more or less like this):

“Don’t you think that photographs become more enigmatic, and more interesting when you don’t know where they were taken from? Don’t you think that somehow, once you tell people where they are from, a spell of some kind is broken?”

I have to agree. In a way, putting any text near an image defeats the purpose. Surely a photograph should be all that is needed to convey the work? Yet we do it, and I think it is because for some reason, people need to know where the shot was made. They need answers. And yet I feel that with imagery, there doesn’t really have to be one.

I’ve said this before, but I enjoy movies better when I’m left to interpret the story. What exactly happened in the end? Did they get out alive? When those kinds of questions are left unanswered, the meaning of the movie become more a personal interpretation. We own it.

Conversely, in some films, they have to have a post-amble where they explain what you saw, and what happened, and sort of tie up everything into a neat conclusion so you can go home now and not have to think about anything ever again. There is no interpretation, because you are told that whatever you thought was going on, or your interpretation of subtle events in the film may have been false. You end up not owning the experience so much because someone has told you that what you thought was there, wasn’t.

And so, getting back to titling images, or even explaining why you made them in some way, is sort of pointless. But more than that, it can rob them of a personal interpretation that the viewer may own. I have had countless interactions with someone who has said ‘I always thought that photo was made in Torridon, but I was so surprised to find out it was made in another place entirely.

I think anonymity is good. I just don’t practice it so much, but I have been swinging that way more lately because I think it allows the work to remain more personal.

Distillation

It’s always worth going back over the work you edited recently and trying to whittle the selection down to a more distilled set.

I gave myself the task of looking at the last three edit sessions with the aim of making six images per set.

I believe that less is more. But we often get overwhelmed by the ‘love-is-blind’ drug that races through our veins the moment we’ve finished editing some new work. I often find I love the work while doing it, but I pay attention to the work that tires over a few weeks. That is what’s known as ‘objectivity’. The rose tinted spectacles have come off, and although I don’t discard the other images fully (they are probably still worthy and quite nice), they perhaps aren’t as strong as the ones I end up with.

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Fjallabak, Iceland September 2021

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Assynt & Inverpolly, Scotland, October 2021

Isle of Harris, Scotland, October 2020

The illusion

We live in a world of expectations, always projecting into the future, rarely sitting in the present moment. We also live in a world where we have the illusion of control. Life has no guarantee. Whereas, photography is the art of learning to submit. It forces us to live in the present moment, and accept what nature gives us.

What are you looking down here for? More? I think I said all that needs to be said ;-)

Happy new year.

Bruce.

Old friends - the lifespan of a photographic relationship

I’ve been coming to the Fjallabak region of the Icelandic interior for about six years . We are, in my view, old friends now.

I have thought often that everything in life is finite. There is a start, a middle and an end to most things. This particular train of thought has been with me for most of my time as a photographer since photography was not my first love. I was initially captured by music at the age of 12 and had been a serious-amateur for most of my life up until around the age of 34. Had someone told me at the time that my endeavours into music would end, and be replaced by photography, I wouldn’t have believed them. This is why I now understand that everything has its time.

I mention this because I think it’s good to understand the ebb and the flow of our creativity and that a relationship with a landscape has a start, a middle and also perhaps an end.

At the beginning of visiting a new place, it is like the beginning of any new relationship. There is so much to understand, discover and learn. And this can be an amazing draw to keep pulling us back if we find a landscape that resonates with us.

Like most relationships, as we get more acquainted with a landscape, we learn ‘how it is’. We get a feel for its moods, and what it might bring on a certain day with certain weather conditions. There is danger here in assuming that the little we know of a place, is all there is to know (Dunning Kruger Effect: the less we know, the more we think we know). Landscapes, I have found, keep surprising me upon each visit I make to them. Take for instance the opening shot to this post today. I have been to this lake many times now (it is a personal favourite place) but I had not seen snow shapes like this before, and so I found some new compositional possibilities.

As the relationship with your landscape ‘muse’ grows, I do think we hit a point where we are starting to repeat ourselves. Sure, there is value in variances of weather and lighting, but ultimately, we are starting to feel an over-familiarity with it.

I think I’m at my 75% way through my relationship with Fjallabak as it stands with my ‘current style’. Emphasis should be on ‘current style’, because I do think a relationship is never truly over. We can always pick up the reigns again at some stage if we find new value or interest in something we felt we had outgrown.

But I am certainly feeling an over-familiarity with the Fjallabak region, and this is evident in the work I am choosing to publish. Rather than publishing twenty or so images, I’m finding the results to be much more distilled. The bar has perhaps been raised, and I’m looking for something ‘more’ than I would have done say five or six years ago.

This is perhaps a study on self-awareness. Knowing where you are within the relationship you have with a landscape. I don’t really know if it has value, but I think it does. I’m just not sure in which way. But I have certainly promoted the idea that self-awareness is a key ingredient to trying to be the best artist / photographer we can be.

I’d like to finish by saying that I think it’s impossible to second guess where we are going next with our photography. Although I am feeling that most of what I’ve wanted to say with the Fjallabak region has been said, that is really only based on what I’m currently looking for. I’ve noticed over the past decade that my photography has shifted (and hopefully grown), but it has certainly changed. Ebb is just as important as flow, as I think it can often signal a need for change, or just that you have changed. What you were once looking for no longer applies. So I think it’s best to just keep that in mind.

Knowing where you are in any relationship is I suppose key, and this leads back to the idea that being self-aware is a skill we should all try to develop.

Photography as allegory

Allegory:

a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning

a symbol.

Although I have mostly been unaware that I am trying to tell a story, or stories through my photography, I have come to realise that this is indeed what most, if not all of us, are doing when we make pictures.

There is meaning in all our imagery and I think it is hidden to everyone including ourselves. I am convinced more and more that there is a narrative at play in my work, which for me, I have come to believe that I will spend the rest of my photographic life trying to unravel.

All photographers use imagery to express something. For most of us, the message we’re trying to express is at best, not fully understood, but typically, we’re not even aware that we are trying to express anything. To a large degree, I think there is mystery in my motivations for making photographs I make.

But I am aware that even the process of going out and spending a few hours alone in the landscape brings forth a conversation within. Staring at a sky, or watching a tree sway in the wind allows me to connect to the present moment and to think about the passage of time. I often find myself thinking about where I am, why I am here, and my place within the whole scheme of things.

In this way, I think all imagery I create is an allegory to some degree. The images show a conversation at play. All I know is that each of my images means something to me, and I am also aware that this meaning is personal. The work is either documentary (I was here at this time, and this is what I saw), or it is a symbol for something (I feel it, but can’t put into words what I feel).

Like a piece of music that can move us, the music has more meaning, and depth when it is our own composition. In that way, all our imagery is personal. And it often has meaning that even though we cannot explain it to others, means something to us in a way that it does not to anyone else.

This is perhaps the core reason for photography: what can’t be explained in words can sometimes be expressed as imagery.

pale blue dot

As a photograph, pale blue dot does it for me. Puts everything into perspective. Man, wish I’d taken this shot, but if I had, I’d be an awfully long way away from home. But when I look at that little spec, I realise that this is everything I know. Everyone who’s ever lived, and everybody I know is on that title pixel.

I wish you all a merry xmas and a positive 2022.

Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), as part of that day's Family Portrait series of images of the Solar System.

Seen from about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles), Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light.

We are our memories

I’ve been reflecting lately. Mainly about the death of my dad, how much I miss him, and how my memories of growing up shaped me. This is all intertwined with the landscape that I grew up in. So today I want to show how Scotland’s landscape has, through memories and experiences, shaped what I search for in all my photographic work.

A few years back, I was honoured to be asked to write an introduction to Julian Calverley’s fine landscape book North Northwest. I’ve been thinking lately about the entry I wrote for him, which I reproduce here:

Landscape as Metaphor

As a seven year old child, I had not yet developed the capacity to remember place
names or to even think of the landscape as anything but the ground I stood on and
the earth I would play in.

Although landscape as metaphor as a deeply routed concept would not become part
of my psyche until much later; the Scottish climate, and in particular the tonal palettes
of dark autumns and wet winter days, already had. Each year, my father would drive
us north into the highlands. As we travelled by car, the landscape would morph from
being one of towns and populous places to vast areas of stark beauty.

The weather and climate would appear to conspire to change to fit the landscape,
becoming more menacing and dramatic, almost as a response to the beauty of these
empty wild places. I had never thought that my past would play such an important
role in my photography until I saw Julian’s pictures. His world is one of dark tones and
muted greys and browns that resonate with my upbringing. He thrives on working in
a tonal palette that many would not. As a result, I see and remember the countless
days of my growing up in his emotive imagery.

Stac Pollaidh, Inverpolly, Scotland October 2021. Image © Bruce Percy

I’ve been wondering how much of my relationship with the landscape has been shaped by my roots? I would say these days that I’m immensely proud of my Scottish background, and feel that the atmospheres, the weather, and growing up in a sometimes ‘dark land’ has had a profound influence on what I’m drawn to.

It may come as a surprise that I think this, because I haven’t really made any serious effort to photograph Scotland in well over a decade now. But I would like to point out that I think I have been chasing the spirit of the Scottish landscape elsewhere.

Let me explain if I can: you have to leave sometimes, in order to return, because there is a lot to be learned in the parting, and similarly, a lot to be learned in the returning.

In all relationships, parting for a while has a lot to teach us about how we feel about the relationship. Having time apart allows one to gain objectivity about what is important in the relationship. Coming back is always the time when we know just how we really feel about the relationship.

So that is how I feel about Scotland. I spent the first decade of my photographic life making all my photographs here. But I didn’t think I had enough objectivity to really appreciate the landscape. It was my ‘norm’, and as all ‘norm’s go, you can’t see them for what they are if you are staring at them all the time.

I have found that as I’ve continued to travel abroad, it provided context, and contrast. Going somewhere quite different from what you know, makes one realise just how special or unique a familiar landscape can be. But I also think that going somewhere quite different allows one to notice similarities as well.

Particularly the similarities. They seem to indicate to me that I’ve been ‘chasing Scotland’ elsewhere. I seem to be drawn typically to landscapes that have a lot in common, at least weather wise, and perhaps tonally as well.

I haven't done much travelling for obvious reasons for around 20 months now, and I’ve found this has been a form of ‘returning’. As I’ve started to reconnect with my homeland, I’ve come to acknowledge that my past, my upbringing, and living in a Scottish climate has had massive impact on what I’m drawn to.

Last December I lost my dad. I was very close to him, and we had a terrific relationship where he often told me that we were more like buddies than father and son. He was a highlander. From Sutherland with that Highland lilt and clear pronunciation of accent. As the months since his death have progressed, I’ve found myself reflecting about our time together, and how in fact, every thing we experience is transitory, and to be cherished. I think that a parent’s death is a rite of passage for many of us. It brings on time for reflection, for understanding who we are, and where we are in life. And I found myself realising that this awareness of my Scottish roots has been surfacing for some time. As is evident in my foreword to Julian’s book.

In the foreword, I wrote about my childhood. And although it is not explicitly stated, I was describing Glencoe. I have very strong memories of how Glencoe was this foreboding landscape that I didn’t know the name of, but was so memorable because it had a mood and an atmosphere like no other.

I know my family holidays into the highlands shaped me. I know that when I go to Patagonia or Iceland, I am working with what Scotland taught me about mood and character. The Scottish landscape, it seems, has been at the basis of everything I’ve been shooting in one way or another. Except I have only been able to realise this by reflecting upon my time with my dad, my childhood, and of course, by spending time apart from it.