Black & White

Colour

Thoughts on Photography

 

Photography has been a significant part of my family for almost as long as I can remember, my two brothers have a similar passion and Father was a serious amateur during my childhood. I have some shots of his taken in India in the 1930’s, and some from 1950’s Hamburg and northern Germany taken with a twin lens reflex Rolliflex.

 

I have used whatever camera I could get my hands on including at various times including a Box Brownie 127, Voigtlander Brilliant TLR,  Exa 500 SLR, and Olympus OM4. Olympus disappointed me when they originally decided not to produce digital SLR’s, and I reluctantly changed to a Canon system. Going digital was something of a wrench too since I was accustomed to doing my own B&W processing and grew accustomed to the smell of hypo on my fingers after a darkroom session.

 

I find myself to be rather a purist when it comes to photography and prefer to “see with my eye” before composing through the viewfinder, and I agree with Bert Hardy (Picture Post) that the camera is less important than the photographer.  Photoshop-ing a digital photograph can be helpful in some instances – such as adding an HDR effect, giving a sepia tone, or stitching together a panorama, but some of my best shots have come straight out of the camera.

 

Seeing with my eye has become a response to much of the ugliness we see all around us and the corresponding message that 'everything is ugly'. It's my way of saying it is just not that way, despite the undoubted partial truth, and that beauty remains even though marred by humankind's greed, avarice violence and every kind of faithlessness. I first became aware of this truth observing war scarred bomb sites with precious signs of new green life amid mountains of rubble that grew into beautiful hopeful signs

that said 'all is not lost beyond hope'

 

Though I admire the work of Henri Cartier Bresson, I have been influenced more by landscape and impressionist  works of art  than by photography….perhaps, I hope, it shows.