Getting There

Now into my third week of term two, and things aren't quite where I'd like them to be... that's not to say it's all bad though. The good news is, I can now develop and print in colour, which makes me happy - it's something I've wanted to learn for a long time. Admittedly, most of the tricky parts are taken care of by machines, but I still enjoy making the prints in the darkroom.

I'm not too keen on the colour paper though - I'm using Fuji Crystal Archive, as it's apparently the most easy to get regular supplies of. It has that weird plastic feel much like cheap inkjet and resin-coated black and white papers, definitely not too keen. The much nicer feel of fibre-based paper is just one of the many things drawing me back to black and white.

I'm still no further with choosing an aim for this term's work. It seems that with everything I read, and every artist's work that I look at, I just seem to be adding layer upon layer of confusing directions that I'd like to take my work in. I guess all I really need to do now is sit down and try and consolidate these messy thoughts into some kind of coherent form that I can make a body of work based on.

Researching can be dangerous in some ways. I had an idea for some work based on the telephone network equipment that I used to work with on a daily basis. The equipment comes in many shapes, sizes, colours, and degrees of flashy LED illumination, and there's definitely some interesting stuff to be found in telephone exchanges, not to mention their great significance as great unrecognised hubs of social interaction. I'd pre-visualised some of the images I had in mind - what I had wanted to feature in the pictures, and how I wanted them to look. With this idea in mind, you can only imagine how it felt when I discovered Lewis Baltz had made a set of almost perfectly identical images in the early 1990s... Damn!

I have to wonder how things might've turned out had I not discovered this Baltz body of work. I wonder about whether I could've confidently forged ahead unknowing, and produced work I was genuinely happy with; whether I could've exhibited the work without anybody ever noticing, or whether I'd even get the chance to hear viewers making the snide "he's just ripping off Baltz" comments. Mysteries indeed. Either way, I'm not sure I can feel confident in going ahead and making that set of images knowing there's something so close to my intentions already out there.

As it stands, I've cobbled together a couple of things that I might look into. One that's standing forward in my mind is the idea of the Scottish colour palette. I'd been looking at Joel Meyerowitz's Cape Light series, along with the work of Stephen Shore (among others) and really getting this feel for a very American type of light. I'd noticed this in New Zealand too - that the light had a very different quality about it. Scottish light is something special though, never does light get so incredibly flat and featureless. It has an incredible ability to absolutely suck the life and colour out of any given scene.

At first, this was of great frustration for me as a photographer in my early days. I was a big fan of high-saturation film, especially Kodak 160VC, and it made for some really crappy looking pictures when the light was flat. Trying to push out tons of contrast on overcast days just led to some really disappointing images. I almost wouldn't bother leaving the house some days if the skies were cloudy. On a recent trip up through the north-west of Scotland, I started beginning to appreciate this flat light as something very fundamental to the Scottish way of life.

Being Scottish is something I quite often have problems with. On one hand, I do find a lot of the landscapes, places and people very inspiring; but on the other hand, there's nothing that pisses me off quite like stupid nationalism (Scottish or otherwise), and the last thing I would want to do would be to take postcard shots of beautiful mountains and for anyone to get this idea that I was a full-blown proud Scot, because I'm most certainly not that.