Tunstead Quarry, Derbyshire 2008: Aesthetic record
My first call to photography came through an interest in landscape – from a functional perspective, as a professional ecologist. The aesthetically driven imagery of much contemporary landscape photography produces dramatic and beautiful images but tells little of the functional character and origin of the landscape which, in the UK at least, is almost entirely shaped by human occupation and use. These two perspectives are not easy to reconcile. An ecological and functional view of the landscape centres on an understanding of physical and biological relationships and is concerned with process and change. The contemporary mainstream of landscape photography is more concerned with aesthetically driven values and a kind of an environmental spiritualism.
I have sought in these images to explore both the ‘objective’ appearances of things and their subjective interpretation. In landscape photography (including industrial landscapes), the quality of light seems to me to be the most important factor in shifting the emphasis of affective response – in directing interpretation. This is why the polarisation of photographic styles between contemporary, conventional landscape photography and the neutral, deadpan style of the New Topographics (for example the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher), centres critically upon the light at various times of day and under different weather conditions.
