It's all in the name...

Spillway, Hoover Dam, Arizona, August 2018

One of my photographic images; no title, just a simple factual caption. Why no title? Read on…

“Arrest”, “A Bigger Splash”, “The Fight Between Carnival And Lent” - titles for artworks are largely about interpretation; they provide a framework in which the artist or photographer wants the viewer to experience the results of their creativity. Titles can be very descriptive, or not descriptive at all.

If you’ve taken a look at my work, you may have noticed that my art, the stuff I do on canvas or paper, is named. Each work has a title. On the other hand, my photos do not. Why is that?

When I was younger, seeing photographs with titles just seemed wrong. Artworks had titles, yes, but photos? Certainly all the photos by photographers who I admired didn’t. They sometimes had captions – places, dates, possibly the simplest of descriptions of the content or subject of the photo, but not a title. If there was anything, it was simple and factual.  No creative, conceptual, or abstract string of words. I didn’t really think critically about it at the time, but the captions seemed to add some sort of authenticity or legitimacy to photographs, and perhaps that hinted at the struggle which photographers have had over the decades to get their work accepted as a serious creative statement, rather than a simple record of an event. Of course, there’s also the argument that providing only factual information will allow the viewer to form their own opinion of the content of the photo; they’re not being dictated to by anyone.

Many years ago when I worked for the Civil Aviation Authority, I once took part in the annual staff photographic competition. As it happens, my entry was of an aircraft, but many other entries were not aviation related at all. The one that sticks in my memory does so not because of the subject, but because of the title it had been given. The subject was a canal boat on a canal in an industrial landscape, maybe in the Midlands, and on the water were a number of ducks or possibly geese, but nothing more regal than that. And the title it had been given? Swanee River. I mean, really? The composition was quite attractive, the printing was good, overall it was an effective photo – in every respect except for that ridiculous title. The problem for me was simple; firstly, there were no swans, and secondly there was no river (it was a canal, not a river!). I could imagine the little laugh the photographer had had when he gave the photo that title, but for me it was no laughing matter. It was all wrong, it just wasn’t serious. Maybe I was being a bit too serious myself for thinking like that, but it just didn’t fit. It completely ruined my experience of that image, and instead all I could think about was how ‘bad’ and inappropriate the title was.

De Havilland DH88 Comet racer, Hatfield Airfield, 4th Juy 1987

This is a scanned copy of the black-and-white print that I entered into the 1988 Civil Aviation Authority staff photo contest, the one where I came across the photograph mentioned in the text titled “Swanee River”…

So, perhaps that one small event has coloured my approach to titles for my photos, but the desire remains for me to keep it simple and to let the viewer decide – 99% of my photos will have nothing more than simple descriptive captions. Perhaps if I decided to make photographic images that were more conceptual and abstract my opinion might change, but for now the caption is king.

Atomic Weight

One of my artworks - with a title! The title may actually mean nothing to most, but perhaps it’s intriguing at the very least? I wouldn’t expect anyone to guess, but the title refers to the fact that the division between the two blocks of colour in the artwork is based on the ratio of the atomic numbers of silver and gold. The viewer doesn’t know this, but I do, and when I’m creating art like this having something to control the decisions I make with regard to the composition and so on adds meaning to the process.

But; what about the titles I give to my artwork? I suppose that, because the results of my art practise are just SO abstract, a simple caption doesn’t make sense, so I usually give the piece a name. It doesn’t have to mean anything to anyone but me, and in fact, it probably won’t, but that’s the very reason why I think it works. Although the artworks I make are indeed abstract, I do have an idea or a concept in mind when I’m planning and making them, and it’s possibly for that reason that I feel it’s OK to nudge the viewer in the direction that I was taking when I made the piece. At the same time, it still leaves plenty of room for the viewer to make what they will of the work. Perhaps it helps, perhaps it doesn’t, or maybe it even suggests a different direction for the viewer to take for themselves, but that’s fine by me.

Why Portraits?

Elena

Most of the time, I like the photos I make. I like their graphic qualities, I like the colour stories they tell, I like the natural world they capture. But for years, I’ve always liked the way other photographers capture spontaneous images of people. Street photography, you might call it. A busy scene somewhere in India, or Sao Paulo, or Bradford, it doesn’t matter where, but an image that’s full of life, colour, texture and interest. An image that begs a question or that tells a story. I’m always impressed by the way someone can put themselves out there in that situation and capture an image of people that grabs our attention. Well known photographers like Dougie Wallace or Martin Parr, and Instagrammers such as at.sushi.photo or Sohail Kharmani are all the sort of image makers that I admire, for just this reason.

The truth is, I just can’t do that myself. I’ve usually found it almost impossible to capture that style of image; I think it’s all down to being very shy. Painfully shy, in fact, when I was young. I’ve got past much of my natural reticence now, but standing in the street and pointing the camera at people is still not something I can do. If, on the other hand, there is a measure of cooperation between subject and myself, well that’s a different matter. Making portraits is something I really enjoy.

Sarah

It’s hard to say what I’m looking for in a subject; I’m not consciously trying to show you, the viewer, some truth or emotion that’s lurking behind the subject’s eyes, but I still think the images work, and people do seem to like them, which is nice. I guess there is just something that most of us find fascinating when we’re looking at other people’s faces. Maybe we do try to read things into them, or maybe not, but we still manage to connect with people in a way that doesn’t really happen with other subjects.

Technically, I like to shoot fairly close, filling the frame, and I often use one of my Zeiss lenses, known for their high quality optics. Even so, I process the images using Photoshop and often soften the final image, at least in part, not so much to smooth out the skin or ease any creases, but to impart a bit of mystery, a slightly other-worldly look to the finished result. And just as I enjoy making the images, most of my subjects seem to enjoy the experience, too, so why not get in touch? I’m always on the lookout for new subjects, and you never know, you might just like the end result!

Influences. We all have them...

The Yorkshire Moors, a fabulous playground when I was young.

Influences. We all have them, I suppose. What makes me, me and you, you? We often seem very attached to our roots, our national identity, and in many cases also our regional one. I was born in a tiny cottage at the east end of a small Yorkshire village, high on the Pennies, closer to Lancashire than most of the rest of Yorkshire. And having been born there, I spent most of my early life living at the west end of that same small village, until I left to go “down south” at the age of eighteen.

The downside of living there was that it felt incredibly isolated (during teenage years, at least), and in winter it was cold, bleak, dark, and wet. The rainclouds piled up against the Pennines as the prevailing wind drove them from across the Irish Sea before dropping their contents on us. Except that the rain didn’t fall straight down; it always seemed to be closer to the horizontal. 

But in summer - oh, summer - there was no place on earth that could beat it. Lush green fields giving way to purple heather in an otherwise minimal landscape of open moorland. Blinding blue skies split by the white arrows of airliners travelling north from Heathrow or other cities in Europe before heading out over the Atlantic to the New World on their Great Circle trajectories. 

That landscape of block colour, long undulating horizons, the cry of the solitary Curlew, big skies and lots of weather has certainly had an impact on me and coloured my visual response to the world. Simple, minimal, graphic, shapes and simple, strong, colour schemes tend to be how that influence manifests itself in my photos and also my artworks.

But, although landscape played a large part in making me, there were lots of other influences, too.  I find a connection with all sorts of things; engineering, architecture, aviation, graphic design, electronic music, to name but a few. All sorts of words come to mind when I think of those things – neatness, precision, purity on the one hand, passion, beauty, complexity on the other. 

So, lots of influences that are evident in my image making. But landscape is definitely one of the important ones.

What about you?