jeudi 25 novembre 2004

More cenes from Wiltshire The Great Ridgeway In 1948 the noted British photographer Bill Brandt took a picture of Barbary Castle in Wiltshire for the book "Literary Britain" which was to become one of his best landscape images. Brandt knew how to balance "the light of day with the dark of night" and was especially adept at using shadows as an important part of a picture's composition. That famous photograph of the Iron Age fort showed the earth bank, which was half the picture, as total blackness. A slight dip in the bank led the eye to the two well-known clumps of trees further along the Great Ridgeway where it crosses Hackpen Hill. The sky was blank and there was nothing else in the photograph - it could almost have been a cut-out paper collage or silhouette. Try as I might, I have never been able to approach the mystery that Brandt put into his shot. He often waited hours for a squall of sleet or rain, not simply to add visual drama, but to reveal how those places actually felt. My forays to the earthwork never managed to repeat that, possibly because the area is now a Country Park and attracts families with children, picnics, dogs and kites... and the ever intrusive sight and motorised sounds of "off-roaders." On reflection, thank goodness nothing is ever the same otherwise we would not be out there seeking our own enjoyment nor making our own images. The scene may seem to have changed a lot in the past fifty or more years, but in reality it's probably quite similar to how it was four and a half thousand years ago when the first travellers of those times walked on the same route through the same ramparts on their journeys across southern England. My more fruitful locations along the same Ridgeway have been around and just beyond the Avebury Stone Circle a few miles to the south of Barbary. Perhaps I felt more at ease there... I passed through the area early every morning returning from my girlfriend's home (Trish is now my wife) to my own and always stopped at least to pause for thought, breath the air, listen to unseen skylarks high overhead, read the light and take some photographs from a new angle perhaps. One such angle, as shown here, was far from new... it's one of my most repeated shots of the area. Having passed this stone maybe a thousand times (no exaggeration) I must have photographed, or included, it in at least one hundred images, compositions, scenes, whatever. The clumps of trees on the horizon which so typify the openness of Wiltshire and the shelter afforded by them to modern Ridgeway foot travellers would not have been there when the first tribes of people used this route... safety in those days meant being in the open... clumps of trees held hidden dangers. From a distance the clumps look quite neat and petite... but approach one and you'll be surprised at their size... not a handful of beech trees per clump but perhaps a hundred or more! However, it's always from a distance I've found them to be most photogenic... as in this image. In the 1980s I'd been doing quite a lot of freelance work for Ilford in the UK... they had purchased non-exclusive reproduction rights to a number of my images for use on product packs, in literature and at international exhibitions. I remember well the meetings with the Ilford publicity managers in London, Jose Toggwiler and Eva Beagan, and being puzzled at their handling of my photographs. Their trick was to make a really crappy photocopy and look through the paper against the light to view the reversed and lower contrast image... if it still looked OK they reckoned it would hold up in reproduction on product boxes! I've tried to reproduce what their version of a crappy photocopy looked like... but copiers nowadays are very good and I couldn't achieve the desired result in the local Maison de la Presse this afternoon so fudged it in Photoshop... but you'll get the idea. You can also see from my scans of actual product and pamphlet originals that the contrast and repro quality was certainly lower than my original. You can do the same with your own prints by holding them up against the light and viewing through the back... and upside down. It's a neat trick to remember if you're unsure of the composition or tonal balance of an image... you really do see your photographs in a new light. 8:57:18 PM    comment []