Scars on Land III

I’m fascinated by scars on land, that seem to float in space.

Venturing into the Icelandic interior during the winter time provides black brush strokes on a white canvas. Sky and ground become inseparable and the eye is fooled into thinking that the landscape is floating.

For the past five or so years, I have tried to offer an exceptionally different trip into the interior of Iceland.

In the wintertime, the middle of the country is uninhabited. It is a pure wilderness. Almost every man-made mark on the landscape is buried for months under several metres of snow and ice.

It’s been a real adventure to come into the interior. When you are working with almost nothing, the ‘framework’, or ‘skeletal’ aspects of the landscape become more evident. I think the graphic forms that are evident here are quite tantalising, and I have never been to such an empty place in my entire life. It is incomparable. Unique.

I have been convinced for many years that all landscapes have a foundation structure. Just zoom out of your images to look at them as thumbnails, and their underlying structure becomes visible.

I’m not sure I will return to the interior in wintertime. There simply hasn’t been the demand or interest levels to keep running a tour. Which is a shame, because I think you get a real experience of what it must be like to be in the middle of an ice sheet, for the fraction of the cost of going to Greenland or Antartica.

But I am certain of one thing, and that is; this landscape has changed my view of photography forever.

I don’t think I can look at more traditional landscapes any longer, without seeing the basic framework that holds them together. As I say: this landscape has changed me forever.

A different kind of minimalism

Last year we had the absolute minimal conditions in the interior of Iceland. Where last year it had been impossible to tell the difference between ground and sky, this year we were greeted with endless blue-sky days.

So we had to come up with another plan: we focussed on the sunrise and sunset times to work with the beautiful soft tones that I think this landscape excels at.

It's like I've been in a monochrome world this past year or so while my style of photography has become more and more minimal: less subject matter and less colour. But with this collection I feel as though I'm able to let a little colour back in.

Where we often think of scenes being overly complicated due to the number of objects we place within the scene, so too, can colour be too much sometimes. Trying to find the balance between a lot, and not enough is like trying to find the vanishing point. I think I'm really intrigued by the thought that something can move so close to becoming indiscernible, unclear. It ads mystery. Not quite knowing where the division is.

Distancing from the work

It’s been five years since I began my visits to Hokkaido. This year we had very little snow on the Island, and I found myself advising tour participants who were with me to position their cameras on the ground. That way you remove all the clutter and debris that can cause distraction. It felt like an up-hill struggle to find good images, because the snow was too thin on the ground.

Those of you who know and follow my blog well will know I never like to edit too soon after the shoot. It’s a worry that some bias or attachment will jaundice my view. I wish to be as honest with myself as I can. To see what’s really there, rather than what I hoped was there. Emotional memories can blur my judgement and by distancing myself from the capture stage, I have more chance of reaching an honestly in the work.

Despite there being a lack of snow this year, and the frustrations involved in trying to keep a tour running when the locations were either not as ideal as previous years, I find I don’t see those problems now. That’s what I like about distancing myself from the work. I remove all the previous emotional hang ons, and on this occasion I feel the lack of snow does not detract from the final outcome.

Torres del Paine national park in the heart of Chilean Patagonia is an old friend.

I’ve been coming here since 2003. Visiting old friends can often find oneself repeating the same stories and the same encounters. There is sometimes nothing new to develop in the friendship, but just being in each others company is still very beneficial.

My photography has gone through many changes over the years, and I often wonder ‘will I be able to photograph Torres del Paine in a new way?', or will I revert back to old habits?’.

I think that visiting the same landscape over many years can be a great barometer in ones own development. I feel as if I am able to see new things in a landscape that is now very familiar to me. It’s encouraging to note that I’m changing.

I also think that we are the accumulation of our experiences. I’m sure, when I look at these images of Torres del Paine that I see a little of my Hokkaido work in there. The subtle sensibilities I’ve build up by working in such a quiet landscape have allowed me to see Torres in a similarly quiet way also.

One thing leads to another, and through our journeys, we come out the other side changed. Always for the better.

The Idealised View

Photography isn’t about capturing what’s in front of us. It’s more about capturing what is within us. Often when I see workshop participants want to stop somewhere to make a photograph, it isn’t what’s in front of them that they are drawn to. Instead, they are drawn to an idealised view of what’s there.

When we see a composition in our mind’s eye, what we do is take each element of the scene that is important to us, and discard the rest. Although the scene may be far from perfect, we focus on the parts that give us what we see in our mind, and discard the rest. This is often why many of us find our photographs never match what ‘we saw’ at the point of capture.

In other words: we have a tendency to idealise the view.

If we can find such an idealised view that requires little or no post-edit work, this is perhaps the goal we all seek. But it’s often not like that, and often most compositions out there are compromised in some way.

I think this is why I love Hokkaido so much. Although the landscape is heavily shaped by man, with a bit of work it is possible to find those rare moments when everything clicks into place and all the components before my camera lens fit into perfect symmetry. It satisfies my urge to make sense of the nonsensical, to make order of the disorderly, and to make pleasing compositions of random elements that come together for a brief moment in what seems like an intended way.

My deepest of thanks go to my guide in Tsuyoshi and my inspiration for coming to Hokkaido in the first place: Michael Kenna. I’ve learned so much from you. Thank you.

This was my last trip anywhere with my dad. A highlander, born in Sutherland, he had never been to the outer Hebrides, yet had travelled to more countries than I can remember.

My dad passed away in December last year. I dearly miss him. He came on many adventures with me.

I wasn't sure I got any photographs on this trip to Harris which was in October 2020. I just didn’t think my heart was in it at the time, and the films had been lying around on a work bench, waiting patiently to be processed. I got them done as an after thought. Better clean up these and see what’s on them.

I think my favourite one is the deep green sea image. Taken on a very dark, dark stormy, rainy day. I wouldn’t ordinarily think it would suit being in a collection of high key toned images but strangely, it does feel right to me.

Old friends

It’s been around six years or so since I started to explore the Fjallabak region of Iceland’s interior. I think I can say we are old friends now.

Many places in the nature reserve have become places I understand and know so well. For me, I am finding I wish to make photographs when I see these places under unusual conditions or what I would deem ‘optimal’. This September tour we had an interesting mix of snowy winter and autumnal conditions.

I think it’s natural, as one continues to work in a region, that the resulting images become more and more distilled. Rather than publishing twenty, I’m publishing nine this time. Part of this is because I feel there would be an overlap with what I have already conveyed in previous visits, and as a result, I think the bar becomes much higher. I think this is natural.

Scars on land

What is a landscape, other than scarified lines and mutable elements?

What if water and sky are nothing but texture?

A place that your eye feels a dryness as it moves across the page.

What if the land is nothing but scarified elements, fractures and abrasions?


The land itself has become un-land, and is nothing but difficult abrasions and rough edges?



Abrasive places have beauty as much as any traditional landscape. What one may define as quarry in an attempt to convey a sense of ugliness and deem a place as un-beautiful, may lack the comprehension that all landscapes, even difficult ones, are beautiful.

Shooting nothing isn’t easy. But then again, shooting landscapes that contain something is even harder.

 What one discovers when they shoot a landscape that has been reduced down to some basic elements of form and tone is that these have to coexist and cooperate in a pleasing way for any photographic composition to work. It soon becomes apparent that ‘empty’ landscapes are very hard to shoot because they show up errors in tone or colour very quickly.

Once you’ve been working with simple landscapes for a while, returning to the more classic landscape one can’t help but find things to be texturally dense and cluttered. Too busy even, and you begin to comprehend that although simple landscapes were hard to do well, complex landscapes are even harder.

Visiting a place like Lençois Maranhenses forces this point upon you. It is seldom dense or cluttered and to the beginner one may wonder ‘what is there to shoot?’. It takes a bit of courage to trust that shape and tone are all that is needed. And in my book, the first step towards deconstructing your own photography to the basic, but essential building blocks of your art.

I haven’t really photographed Scotland for about a decade. Well, perhaps a little on the isle of Harris, which was really about 5 years ago. My time when I am here, is spent running workshops, and I suppose my interests in Iceland, Hokkaido and other exotic places have taken precedence over the years.

It’s been interesting for me, due to the current problems with travelling abroad, to focus my own artistic efforts back in my home land. I had been wondering for a while whether I would be able to work with the complexities of the Scottish landscape, and whether it would intrigue and excite me the way that Hokkaido’s minimalism does, or Iceland’s extreme tonality does.

Do you see traces of Hokkaido, Iceland and perhaps Bolivia in this work? I think I do. It’s unavoidable that visiting these landscapes has fed back into what I do, and so I think these Scottish images are a result of that. Perhaps?

Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses

Many years ago, while I was researching some places in the Atacama desert of Chile, I got talking to a couple from Brazil. It was new year’s eve and I was in San Pedro de Atacama for some personal photography.

My Brazilian friends spoke to me of a national park in Brazil that I should visit. I had not heard of it until then but their description of endless sand dunes and lagoons made me wonder if it might be a place worth visiting. The place they were talking about was Parque Nacional dos Lençóis Maranhenses. It is a rare beauty of a place made up of endless sand dunes and lagoons that cover an area of 1,500 km2. 

This collection of images were made during a one week visit to Lençóis Maranhenses, in March of 2018.  

To make these photos, I had to hike over three days. There is no transport here, no roads, no infrastructure except for a couple of tiny remote villages in a desert oasis setting. 

The first two days I walked around 10km per day while on the third day we walked 17km. Often leaving our desert oasis at around 4am so we could cover most of the distance before the day got too hot, arriving at our next camp around 8am. 

Our early morning departures turned out to be ideal for photography. Travelling in a westerly direction we walked with the sun coming up behind us.  I am no fan of the sun in my shot and it is in my view an amateur’s decision to shoot towards it during sunrise. The most beautiful light is at 180º from the sun. This is known as the anti-nodal point and it is where the colours are strongest while the light is softest. There was no exception on this trek and I was greeted with the most beautiful soft tones and subtle shades of colour during my morning walks.

On the final walk of 17km, we had to leave camp at 3am, so we could avoid most of the heat during the day. This meant walking in the dark for three hours, circumnavigating lagoons the size of lakes. This is something I shall never forget. Often our headtorches did not allow us to know just how big some of the lagoons were (many are the size of large lakes) and so it was always a gamble if we should go left or right around them. Further to this, sometimes it was hard to gauge the gradients of some of the dunes we had to walk down in the dark, and I sometimes mistook the scale of a dune to be much larger than what it turned out to be. So many optical illusions brought on by having few reference points to keep me right made for a lasting impression.

This is perhaps one of the most adventurous trips I’ve done. One of sleeping in hammocks outside in the open air, of staring up at the milky way and feeling the warm night breeze keep me dry at night, of walking in the dark around massive lagoons and of the cool sand soothing my bare feet as I walked. We sometimes made shortcuts through the shallower lagoons, sometimes submerged up to our knees in cool soothing water, and other times with the water up to our chests while carrying our camera bags on our shoulders. I shan’t forget Lençóis Maranhenses.

I had no idea what to expect.

The images in this portfolio range from the Bran and Magura areas of Transylvania to the southern Carpathian mountains.

When I returned home, I had no idea how I would approach the review and edit of the work. So I decided to shelve it. Sometimes I have to do that. I’m too close to it, and now eight months later I’m able to look at the work and interpret it.

Sometimes, you just need one image to define the portfolio set. That’s it in a nutshell for me: the first image led the way. Once I got that, I knew where the edits might take me, and that a very very dark blue tone would be a feature of the set.

I’m still getting comfortable with this collection. To some degree, some of the images could easily have been created in Hokkaido, yet there’s more texture, something less clean, more random about the Romanian landscape.

Many thanks to Florin Patras and Dorin Bofan for showing me around and for the very kind invite and generosity with their time. I’ve made good friends and that was worth the plane ticket alone :-)

It always begins with an invitation. This time round, I went with no idea of what was there to photograph.

I travelled to the west coast and the east coast of South Korea over the space of eight days. My impressions of the country were of a massive sprawl of urbanisation with little room for nature.

 But I did find it. And I made some pictures. I had a hunch I was getting something while I was there, but it wasn’t shouting at me with any particularly strong message. I just knew I had something.

I feel it was an introduction. Every first trip is just that after all. A trial to see if there’s more to discover, to see if you want to continue. Well, I certainly do. I feel South Korea may have more to offer me as a photographer. But it just has a very subtle way of showing itself to me.

With deepest thanks to Kidoo for the invitation, and for Jay’s selfless efforts as a guide and driver. Thank you both. I loved every minute of it and hope to return.

Under the skin

This is my fourth time to Hokkaido and this time I spent a month here.

Although I returned to some favourite locations I also found myself exploring new hills and lone copse. The Japanese landscape sometimes seems to feel as if it has been landscaped specifically for the landscape photographer, but take a step back and zoom out, and it is clear this is an industrial island and nature is not at the forefront of its thoughts.

Weather plays a big part in the success of one's image making. Hokkaido is a place where you can top up on your vitamin D because there is so much sunlight, so many sunny days. You have to pick and choose your moments if you wish to record soft light which is only provided at sunrise, sunset and those moments when the skies are overcast.

The Scottish island of Harris is an old friend. I’ve been coming here since around 2009. It’s taught me so much and has been instructive in the development of my photographic style.

I’m not looking for the things I was looking for when I first came here. That’s what’s so special about revisiting a place after a few years have passed. You notice that you see new things, and not just because the landscape has changed, but because you have changed. What was once interesting to you has been cast aside, like the shedding of old skin, to be replaced by a new awareness.

The island hasn’t changed much, despite it turning into a photography mecca these days. There are so many photographic workshops and tours that run here each year, yet when I am there, I feel I have it all to myself. Which is wonderful.

And as for Harris ‘being done’, I beg to differ. Most landscapes are seldom ‘done’. The mere fact that I find myself seeing things anew, is a telling reminder. The landscape always has something to show us, we just have to listen.

Monochrome on an unprecedented scale

The central highlands of Iceland isn’t truly as monochromatic as this portfolio may suggest. Even though the landscape does contain black and white elements, it really has more colour than my images make out. 

I’ve said for a long while that I’m not a verbatim photographer. I don’t shoot what is there. Instead, I like to focus on what my mind thinks is there. I like to get under the skin, and to focus more on what I think the underlying character of a landscape is. For me, the central-highlands is a stark wonder made up of graphic, black and white elements.

As photographers, what we conjure up in our mind’s eye is often a subtraction of the real world. We remove what we find unnecessary and keep what we think is vital. We are biased in attempting to record our own view of things. Indeed, I think photography is about creating one’s own story. It is a medium that allows us to show other what we saw, what we felt was there.

Return to Snow Country

(Kenna Trees)

I often feel that my first images of a new landscape may possess an elusive quality, one that is difficult to recapture on subsequent visits. There is an honesty present, simply because there are no preconceptions to hold on to. Everything is new.

Through repeated visits, this innocence may be replaced by experiences where the initial impressions can often become lost or burried.

Where last year Hokkaido was more about atmosphere and fog, this year I found myself confronted by a more literal representation. 

Hokkaido is a landscape heavily touched by man, and I think by photographing these symmetrically placed trees, I've moved from a point of suggestion to something more unembellished, more truthful.

Iceland's Fjallabak- a minimalist playground

The interior of Iceland during winter is a minimalist playground of black brush strokes against a white canvas. It is a place where sky and ground meet somewhere indivisible to the human eye.

If you are lucky, you meet the right landscape at the right time in your photographic development. Each landscape teaches us something about form and tone, and I believe that many of the landscapes I've encountered have been responsible for shaping my photographic style to a large degree.

I couldn't have come here before everything else I've photographed, I wouldn't have been ready and I doubt I would have known where to begin with this landscape. But it all feels clear to me now. I have been working towards simplified form and tone and this landscape is perhaps at the extreme end of my journey. It is perhaps the ultimate minimalist playground.

The outline of a mountain hanging in space,  with no discernible difference between sky and ground is such a fascinating subject to play with. In this portfolio I have deliberately taken advantage of this ambiguity. The uncertainty that one does not know where the ground ends and where the sky begins can lead to all sorts of illusions, which interests me greatly.

I've never been too interested in conveying what is there, instead preferring to work with what is left unsaid.

The Cono de Arita, is the most otherworldly subject I have yet photographed. It is a startlingly graphic object that changes in contrast as the sun goes down. 

The Puna de Atacama is a surprising place. With deep red labyrinths of clay, and kilometres of giant pumice sticking out of the desert like the shapes of a beached boat hulls, this place is like no other. Make no mistake, this part of the Atacama desert is different from its Bolivian and Chilean counterparts.

I first came here in 2015 to photograph, but i left feeling I'd only just scratched the surface. It's taken me two years to return, as my schedule is so booked out at least a year in advance.

This trip was twice the duration of my first effort, because everything is so spread out. The travelling distances are longer and rougher than the Bolivian landscape and that's saying something. Most days were spent sitting in the car anticipating what the evening shoot would provide.

Each evening the 'good' light would be short - only twenty minutes or so, in which to find a good vantage point. And some of the locations are so vast, that this task often overwhelmed me. I had to repeat many locations, often driving two hours in one direction, often twice a day for several days, so I could study the landscape and figure out what would work as well as not. The Puna is a puzzle that needs time and patience.

This landscape has a more remote, wilder feeling than the Bolivian Altiplano has. I can't explain why but maybe it's due to the more limited resources available; the high plateau of Argentina feels much poorer than its Bolivian cousin, and my guide Pancho would agree. He cites so much economic instability in Argentina as the cause. But I feel these remote places seem to be timeless, disconnected places that have little to do with outside factors. They are what they are, and I think they have rarely changed in decades, if not centuries.

In that respect, the Puna de Atacama is a timeless place to be and any time spent here seems to lead to a lot of introspection and silence.

I actually shot these in February 2017. But the edits are February 2019. Since I believe that the edit is mostly the soul of the photographer’s aesthetic, I would like you to consider these as 2019 images and not 2017 ones.

I feel more relaxed about my compositions than I did a few years ago. My original portfolio of Senja images created in 2015 was an exploration into tone and separation of it. With this new collection I feel as though I’m relaxing a bit, letting the colour come in and also allowing for some random tones to remain in the shots. Perhaps they are more traditional landscapes, but I don’t think so. I don’t think I could have got to here without having done all the tonal work to my images over the past few years.

This set feels joyous to me. A celebration of soft tones, of letting the landscape be what it is, and me following it, rather than it being forced by me to be something it isn’t.

Dark tones abound

This year’s journey into the interior of Iceland seemed to bring on a further distillation of tone. Whereas last year’s photographs still contained a lot of colour, I found myself embracing the blackness of the landscape. Indeed, I feel I was attracted to it, and most of my subjects this year were focussed primarily on dark areas or areas with high contrast between black desert and water or sky.

There seemed to be less green evident everywhere, and the colour in the lakes had gone. Perhaps it had something to do with the filtration of the light? Regardless, it was just different from last year's visit, and I was different also, so any new photographs were bound to have a different character to them.

Whatever the reason for the change in the work, it’s best to let things go the way they want to go. Let them be what they want to be. This time the black desert spoke out more than it has on previous visits, and this time I listened. I can’t explain it more than that.

My previous visits to Patagonia yielded monochromatic, often dark toned imagery. I felt at the time this really summed up my view of this landscape.

Seems I may have been too quick to judge as this year I found myself confronted with a softer, lighter view of the place.

But I think this new lighter imagery came about because of what I'd learned during my recent trip to Hokkaido. It was there that I finally felt I came to terms with lighter tones in my work.

Since visiting Hokkaido in December 2015, I feel my images have been moving towards the higher registers of luminosity. Rather than focussing on the dark tones and 'drama', I now feel I've found a few more octaves of light to play with. I feel I'm in new territory.

In this new work, there is a mixture of dark tones and sometimes light, airy tones. The skill, I believe, is to marry them so they feel part of the same set.
 
I'm so fortunate to return to Patagonia on a yearly basis. I feel as though this landscape often sets me new challenges, new homework, something to help my photography grow in some way.

I had no idea just how different and how wild the island of Senja would be compared to its more southerly neighbour, the Lofoten Islands. Norway's second largest island, Senja is an arctic wilderness. 

Where the Lofoten islands are densely populated with many towns and houses dotted around the landscape, Senja has few. It leaves a lasting impression of an island that is bereft of people, a place where nature is in charge.

I found many motifs to work with here. In winter time, Senja's natural forests - of which there are many - offer up graphic black brush strokes on a white canvas of snow. It's a motif that I spent many happy hours working with. I particularly liked the days when the sky was just as blank and empty as the snow filled landscape was. At these times, sky and ground became inseparable; one and the same. A canvas with which to draw on.

Fjallabak ('fiatlaback'), means 'behind the mountains'. It is a nature reserve situated in the central highlands of Iceland. It is also a place of remote, rugged and stark beauty. 

In terms of colour and tone, I find Fjallabak to be the antithesis of the Bolivian altiplano.

Although both these landscapes can be vast, empty, minimal places, brothers of a sort, I approach Fjallabak very differently to that of its south american counterpart.

Where the altiplano asks for its bright vivid landscape to be embraced for what is there, Fjallabak is the opposite. With it's leanings towards the darker registers of tonality, it is a landscape occupied by suggestion and mystery. This I feel, is a quality that when found, should be embraced.

Shadows and dark tones in the landscape tap into our primeval instincts. These are spaces where our imagination is allowed to run free. 

Upper tones and new awareness

I’ve been playing with the upper registers of tone lately. It’s been a progressional thing for me. I started out years ago with contrasty dark images, but some places just don’t suit that kind of treatment. The Atacama of Chile and the Altiplano of Bolivia are two such places.

I call them collectively the Altiplano as it’s a place that is void of borders for me; in my dreams and in my mind I only see one landscape.

This year was an El Niño year. It wasn’t by far the best year for those vibrant tones I often see at high elevation each sunrise and sunset. But there’s a danger in comparing a visit to a previous one and not running with what you’ve got. This year’s images seem to convey a different quality of light in that respect, and I can’t help think it’s because I’ve chosen to go with what the landscape offered me, than try to get it to submit to any pre-conceived ideas I may have had.

The Altiplano has been a love-affair for me since 2009. I visit the same places each year but I still feel I’m learning and growing. This landscape has taught me so much in terms of simplicity, but also in terms of listening to what it wants to say, and letting it dictate to me rather than me dictate to it. Because of this, it is a surprising place in more ways than I can convey.

There are landscapes that we find challenging and hard, yet we find ourselves returning. It is as if we know there is something there, something worth shooting. It's just that we're not sure what's missing inside of ourselves to allow us to capture what we're feeling.

For me, Easter Island is just like that.

There's a starkness to this place. Black volcanic rubble litters the landscape and often times the light during the day is so harsh it seems that I'll never find the soft tones that I'm seeking in my photography. The light for me, is so different that I really can't make my mind up how best to approach it, so much so, that I've tried going back in different seasons to see if the light is more workable.

This June was perhaps the most successful trip I've had there to date, because it was also the most cloudy. With occasional overcast days that allowed me to shoot the statues and landscape with softer tones, I was happy. But I couldn't shake the feeling that I was still very much in my own comfort zone, willing the landscape to conform to me, and not me to it.

It's been thirteen years since I first visited the island. During that time I've been to many places that have resonated with me, where I feel I was able to grow and produce good work. I've also built up a lot of shooting hours now, so I had high hopes that if I returned to Easter Island now, I may be able to work with it.

This turned out to be only partly true. What I did discover was just how much I've changed since that first trip in 2003. I found myself reflecting a lot on what my level of ability was back then from a technical stand point, but I was more interested to discover that I was really looking for very different things now. I felt as if someone had peeled back a curtain to show me more than I'd been able to comprehend on my first visit.

It was enlightening in more ways than I could have imagined.

Being able to look back at where I'd come from was one thing. But because I was in a landscape that conjured up memories and feelings of who I was back in 2003, I couldn't help feel very reflective about my life. So much time had passed, and rather than being someone in is mid-30's, I was now someone fast approaching 50. I couldn't help look within.

I've often attributed photography to being another way for me to meditate. When I am out there making photos, I become invisible to myself. Time disappears, and the present moment often becomes the only thing occupying my mind.

I am here. Nothing else matters. The past and the future don't even enter into my mind. But sometimes, just sometimes, when I visit certain landscapes they seem to act as a mirror, a time to reflect upon who I am, where I've been and what life has meant to me so far. Other times they ask me questions about where I'm going and what the future may hold.

The landscapes we get to know hold many memories for us. They record imprints of who we were and what we were thinking during our past visits, and they remind us of these each time we return. It's a beautiful and special relationship, and I am often reminded that we're not simply here to make great captures; we're also here because of what this exchange does for us on a more intimate and personal level.

I guess that's why I keep returning to Easter Island. It is a landscape that asks lots of questions through the history I have with it.