Cottages and cloud, Wedderburn-Sony NEX-5, Handheld Twilight mode

Kia ora tatou:

Those of you who have done my workshops know that I often ask you to do some..ummm..gentle visualisation exercises, such as the Phone booth one. I still meet students who remind me that I put them in a phone booth for an hour and asked them to make 60 different photographs. usually there is a degree of approbium….

As part of the Winterlight workshop I take them into the Black Forest, a small area of exotic forest outside Naseby, usually on a cold, dark winter afternoon, and ask them to write a letter to a friend describing what they are feeling. They have one hour for the exercise: 35 minutes to write in their visual diaries what they are experiencing, and 25 minutes to come up with a single image which talks to what they wrote. the following day the group share the images and text. There is method in my madness: I want them to slow down and learn to hear what the place is saying to them, to involve all their senses and respond to that. This is critical in landscape photography if we are to speak with our own voices and document that conversation between the landscape and us ( in that order!) so often I see the photographer’s ego shouting down the landscape rather than a response to it.

Here then, are a series of passages and images from this year’s groups. Names withheld.

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Cell Block, Robben Island

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black. I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man’s freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. I am not truly free if I am taking away someone else’s freedom, just as surely as I am not free when my freedom is taken from me. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

-Nelson Mandela  (Long Walk to Freedom)

We all need heroes. And I have three.

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African Gospel Church, Langa

Crone: Two things, my lord, must thee know of the Wisewoman. First, she is … a woman! …and second, she is …
Edmund: Wise?
Crone: You do know her then?
Edmund: No, just a wild stab in the dark which is incidentally what you’ll be getting if you don’t start being a bit more helpful. Do you know where she lives?
Crone: Of course.

-Blackadder

In ancient lore it is said the Goddess has 3 faces. The first is that of the Mother, who nurtures and protects, who lovingly raises her children and cares for them. The second face is that of the Maiden, the lover, the partner and companion. And the third face is that of the Crone, the hag, the wise woman who shows things as they are, who is beyond Illusion, who knows who she is and offers the plain, unvarnished truth.

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Purgatory/antechamber/waiting room

It really began with a chance comment, with an unexpected conversation.

What are we doing this afternoon? Would you like to go out to Riverton? I hadn’t been there in nearly 15 years, so the opportunity to wander around a town which often attracts derision because of its out-of-the-way location, because of a perception that it is, in some way, Deliverance country, New Zealand-style. Of course towns like this never are. Once we get out of our own way, take our preconceptions and prejudices and put them away in the cupboard, there is always much to be seen, much to be learned. It was going to mean a change of gears, moving from the natural landscape to a human-manufactured one. It was going to mean switching from thinking like a landscape photographer to moving into a more documentary mode. I was fine with that, comfortable with making the switch, and excited about what I might find.

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Sony A900. 24mm. ISO 100, f8 @ 1/320

The future was rushing towards me, drawing ever closer, arriving on the horned wings of an approaching storm. I looked up in horror, in ghastly realisation, and knew that there was nothing, nothing at all I could do to escape, to turn it away….

I am more convinced than ever that whatever we photograph, we need to be passionate about it, we need to embrace it.

Being a restless soul and a Libran to boot, and thus deeply aware of the duality which dwells in all of us, I cannot help myself. I need at least one other way of photographing. I love photographing the landscape, being out there with Creation and drawing it, drawing from it what it is saying to me at the time.

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Kamikaze, Rotorua

Relax, said the night man,
We are programmed to receive.
You can check out any time you like,
But you can never leave.

The Eagles: Hotel California

I am not sure what it is about circuses and sideshows, but they fascinate me. I think they always have. I would like to think it has something to do with a childhood fascination, from being taken to a circus as a child and steering in awe at the clowns and circus animals. But that would be untrue. I have a vague memory, as a child, of being led around the outside of a circus, but never actually getting to see the performance. So there is nothing in my past that Stephen King could use as a hook for one of his astounding horror novels. Yet, at times, whenever I spend an hour or so in a sideshow, I get this uneasy feeling that in some surrogate way, I’m participating in a Stephen King script. So, being a photographer of sorts, I use the camera to help me navigate a path through this sense of the surreal and bizarre.

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Tiresias

I often wonder why so many of us are drawn to photography.

I never cease to be fascinated by the reasons, by the motivations, and by all the myriad-and-one reasons why we take up photography. Over the years when I ask people why they have do it, some have answered confidently, while others have dithered and become tongue-tied. There is no question in my mind that occasionally the reasons I asked those questions were as much for my own benefit, to explain it to myself, as it was to hear what you had to say. I apologise to all of you who thought I was genuinely interested in hearing your particular reason for being in photography, when what I really wanted to hear was an answer to my own question. Such are the ways of ego.

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Releasing the dryad

A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen.

~Edward de Bono

It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.

~P.D. James

It has been nearly two years, but I am still haunted. The moment has yet to unhappen. May it never do so.

It was one of those late autumnal days, when the elementals were throwing the sky around, when the wind was capricious and well-intentioned, but largely unfocused. It would stop, scowl uncertainly beneath its dark cloudy eyebrows, and ponder mightily. Then its face would brighten, a childlike glee would fill its face, and it would dash around, shaking the trees, giving the waves a clip behind the ear and then rush maniacally over the nearest hill for a moment. But it would come back for more. I love the random unpredictability of days like this. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

The following post is the first in a series I will write from time to time, depending on interest and feedback. In  the past I have tended to tallk about the how of photography and the why of photography, but rarely if ever together.

In these posts I want to talk about the journey from pre- to postvisualisation and the steps I have followed in making the image. I intend to offer workshops that explore this in the future and which marry concept and technique. Let me know what you think.

Clouds draw the wind

Brian Turner

You never really finish a piece of work; you abandon it

-Brian Turner

I am in haste. I can feel the land watching me and I am on edge, but I stop for a coffee anyway. (more…)