This week I published my monthly newsletter. Inside it, I showed a collection of new images from Torres del Paine national park in Chile. It is a place I have been going to now for over 23 years.
With this set of images, I feel as if I have come full circle back to who I was in 2009. My imagery back then was more ‘traditional’ and had a lot more colour. Less ‘abstraction’ and more ‘literal’. Over the past sixteen years I have often felt as though my imagery was moving to a more and more reduced, minimalistic look, and I had wondered if I would ever reach an end point with it where I felt as though I could go no further.
Then a few years ago I wrote a post about the ‘pendulum swing of colour’, where I had hunches that our work tends to ebb and flow, and that we tend to go one way hard, only to retreat with the next set of images we create. I certainly give myself full permission to ‘fluctuate’, because that is how it is. We all fluctuate in what we do.
Someone wrote to me after my newsletter to compliment me on my ‘return to colour’ and also to ‘more traditional landscapes’. The email, as well-intentioned as it was, told me a few things:
1). that some folks out there think that some of my previous imagery lacks colour.
2) that my images are not traditional enough at times.
As good meaning as the email was, and I understand it was. It was just further confirmation to me that being an artist always means that your audience:
a) either won’t always get what you do (which is fine)
b) but mostly be one step behind you
c) and that you’re not here to please your audience.
What I took from the email was what I had felt myself to be true, and the email only helped in confirming what I already knew:
a) that there was more colour in this work than usual for me.
b) that it was less graphical, less abstract than some of my work of late.
Helpful observations about the work for sure, and perhaps where I currently am. The email had allowed me to confirm some of my own feelings about what I had achieved with the new set of images.
At first, I wasn’t sure why these images have more colour than usual for me, or why they are more traditional, but I do now think I have an answer about this.
One of the key things we have to do as photographers, is learn to get out of our own way when making images. The landscape of Torres del Paine this winter time had such an amazing array of weather conditions from snowy to pink clear sunrises that it was just a lot easier for me, if I just submitted to what it was, shot it as it was, and edited it as it was. I think in recent years I have become very stylistic driven when assembing a portfolio. I tend to choose those images that suit a certain look, or fit a sylistic narrative that I’ve found. This can be very powerful at developing a unique style to your work, but it comes at the cost of maybe either forcing images to be what they’re not, or that they get rejected because they don’t suit the narrative you’re aiming for.
I felt very relaxed in Torres del Paine. I had no agenda. Being here so many times, and of shooting so many of the locations in certain ways in previous years, I feel as though I simply got out of my own way when shooting.
Likewise, when it came to the edit, I saw a mixture of different narratives that I could have gone for, such as ‘go hi-key and light on the snowy images’ as one option, or ‘go monochrome and almost black and white’ on some of the other images. And of course ‘go colour’ with another subset. Rather than choose one narrative to focus on, I just went for all of them. Because that is what they images showed me they were.
But maybe, the reason why I have such a mixture of different narratives in one portfolio, is that over the years of portfolio making, I’ve just become more experienced at working with different narratives that it is now much easier for me to mix them together as and when required.
When doing our fieldwork, or editing, we can often get in the way of a good image. Learning to know when to step out of their way, and let them be what they are showing you, isn’t always an easy thing to do.
