interview

One of the key elements in the way you work is that you take your photographs at night. Could you tell us a bit about that?

Initially, I just wasn’t interested in taking photographs during the day, but this has since developed to become more considered and systematic. Using the world at night is one of a raft of devices that I employ to cast what would ordinarily be quite banal as strangely unfamiliar. The visual effect of this is clear and is available in the work, but the process of working at night itself is also significant. Wandering around industrial areas of a foreign country in the middle of the night forces a different way of looking. It is as if I am exploring. In this sense these anodyne landscapes become touched by the exotic. There is a hint of the anthropological in the pictures; the impartial point of view they are all taken from claims to the viewer that these things have been stumbled on and recorded. We are allowed to believe that just out of our sight, the world actually looks like this.

The light in the work sometimes appears somewhat artificial, particularly in ‘Model Plant’ and ‘Petrol Station’; how is this achieved and what were your reasons to employ this strategy?

This effect comes from a combination of very careful framing in the first instance and a willingness to alter images in the computer. Whenever possible, I try not to have any naked light sources in the images: I find that they distract from the simple composition that I’m trying to create. If I do end up with a street-light in a picture, that I don’t like, then it’s simply a case of rubbing it out or covering it up. As a result, we can’t see where the light falling in the image is coming from. This can give the look of a Hollywood film set, or a model that has been set up in a studio. The fact that I’m working at night with very slow transparency film and long exposures, also means that the colours are more saturated and that the whole image is more illuminated than it seems like it should be. Again, the computer is used to enhance this when necessary.

With such a variety of processes in photography, with the steady transition to digital and computer generated images could you walk us through the technical decisions in your practise?

I still use film to expose my pictures. Although in many arenas of image making digital technology has become the best option because of the speed of workflow, ease of use and cost effectiveness, these factors are, to a certain extent, removed from my working process. At the point of making the image, there is no need to increase the speed at which I work. The greatest factor though, is that there is still no digital camera that can offer me the quality of medium or large format transparencies. Even those which come close are so ludicrously expensive that they just aren’t an option for a young artist operating on his own. However, because of the general transition from film to digital it is now relatively inexpensive to acquire film equipment. Sticking with this equipment also enforces a slow and considered way of working.

I don’t reject working digitally though. I take very high quality scans of my transparencies and then wok with them in Photoshop for as long as is necessary. In some cases this can be just a handful of hours in others it can be hundreds. Working digitally totally opens up the possibilities and allows you to engage more with image making than picture taking. However, I’m very careful not to make the process that the images go through visible to the viewer. To do so would be to considerably lessen their impact. Part of what drives the images is that fact that they appear as photographs which our visual culture trains us to regard as an index of the world. There is a subtle balance between the viewer being able to tell something is amiss and actually being able to tell where and what that is. To make this effect total, when the image is finished it is printed onto actual photographic paper using a process called Lambda which uses a laser to expose the paper. Because there are no optical elements involved the image that is transferred to the paper is sharper than if it had been exposed with a traditional enlarger.

There is an absence of people in your environments. Personally I feel although they are not physically there, a presence is felt. Was that intentional? How did you come to the decision to exclude any figurative representation?

Putting people in my pictures would present a problem. As my exposures are frequently half an hour or longer, it clearly isn’t possibly to get somebody to stand still for that amount of time. Apart from that though, I’ve never been interested in representing people. Because of the long exposures I have to make sure there is nothing moving in the frame, otherwise it will blur. This means that, unlike most pictures the shutter is not freezing the world: it is still possible to project a sense of time onto the work. As we view the image we can occupy the same space in time as the image, rather than being frozen it is inert- an empty theatre of action. A car could cross the frame, or a person could walk down the street, but for now nothing is happening.

The control of information in your images with regards to challenging perspectives renders forms that are akin to the lines and shapes in abstract painting – attempting to be removed from daily life into something beyond. You talk of an ‘otherness’ in your photographs; do you think this mode of composition selection is one of the ways you have achieved this?

Absolutely. I am increasingly drawn to a handful of motifs all of them very simple. I’m open to people reading them in a variety of ways, but they seem to me rather like tribal totems or powerful monoliths with a singular and powerful force rather like the monolith in 2001. Because of the precision that the computer allows me introduce to the images, straightening lines, balancing the composition and removing things that disturb its reading, is possible for the eye to skim over the surface of the image and see only the pattern. There is then an oscillation between seeing only the pattern, and seeing what the picture is actually of. If I just rendered these compositions as abstract canvases, they would almost certainly look prosaic, dated and rather obvious. However, by meshing these compositions with such banal subject matter the earnestness which characterised the paintings of the abstract expressionists is avoided as the reverences to the sublime are tempered and made almost profane. There is something spiritual in the images that the viewer is invited to engage with, but it ultimately seems artificial.

Your photographs have been taken in a variety of places including Iceland, Japan and Finland. Is location an impulsive decision or do you have certain objectives in finding an environment to photograph?

The specific countries that I visit aren’t that important they just need to fill certain criteria. They have to be industrialised enough to have lot of the paraphernalia that my pictures are made up of. Apart from that, the actual country is unimportant, although that is not to say that the choice of country won’t affect the final image. When you look at things like motorways, the appearance of which probably has more to do with an engineer than an architect, you would imagine they would be the same the world over. I find the subtle differences very compelling. A Japanese motorway flyover could just as easily be in the UK, yet something about it is different, something of Japan has seeped into it. When I get somewhere I look at maps and identify places I think are going to be fruitful, from then it’s just a case of wandering around at night. My locations are therefore equal parts planning and impulse

You said that at the root of your work there is a ‘Romantic motivation. It reaches out for something beyond our direct experience of the world’, but you don’t photograph rural places that one might expect from such a description, instead you choose city backdrops or industrial domains. Why is this?

When the Romantics were first working, they were using rural areas as a place for leisure for the first time. It was for them a new thing to approach the landscape in that way. The work they made was appropriate to the time, but 200 years on is it really possible to make landscape work in the same way? It is true that there are a number of good contemporary artists that make ‘landscapes’, but none of them are unaware of the drastically altered cultural context the work now inhabits and the work is frequently made in a dialectic with this.

Fashions in the Art World ebb and flow and for much of the last century it would have been considered deeply unfashionable to make landscape work, but you can’t crush that romantic sensibility. The American Abstract Expressionists wrote about an eternal and familiar human need and also that it was up to each age to find their own way of representing it. In their case they didn’t use any inherited visual systems, but made the paintings they felt were necessary that related to the post war period and the spectre of nuclear war. My work engages with that same romantic sensibility and it does actually quote elements from its history in art. Rothko compositions, Casper
David Friedrich’s church spires and the grandiose vistas of the American frontier painters can potentially be found in the work. I’m interested in what motivates me to make pictures like this. These industrial vistas allow me to create a very tangible sense of the sublime, but one that is flawed. As we view the work, we become aware that the sublime quality that we are experiencing can’t possibly be a property of the bridge that I’ve pointed my camera at. So if it’s not out there in the world, where is it coming from?