Fine Art Photography and the Needs of Now
Lately I’ve been thinking back to Easter 2018 – lockdown does create plenty of opportunities for retrospection, doesn’t it? – thinking back to my trip to Amsterdam. I was there for a photography workshop which Julia Anna Gospodarou ran for three of us; it was brilliant, challenging and exciting but this is about other memories of Amsterdam – the times when I was out exploring on my own; a solitary traveller seeing a new city (well, a small fragment of a new city) for the first time.
Looking back through the hundreds of photographs that I took in Amsterdam, nothing represents ‘being there’ better than the ones I took early in the morning; walking along the side of the canals before breakfast, as the sun was rising and the city was slowly coming to life; light picking out the top of the buildings; reflections in the water; the sound of bicycles. It was a magical time. ‘Banana Photography’ I called it – just me, the camera and a banana for a pre-breakfast breakfast.
There was a church-like feel to those early hours; standing on the bridges, looking up the canals in the still, quiet mornings – as if I was in church, looking up the aisle to the east end.
And this is something which I represented explicitly in ‘Matins’ when I worked on the images soon after my return.
'Matins'
Diptych of Canal in Amsterdam and York Minster
From the 'Equivalents' series
The series is named after one by Alfred Stieglitz from the 1920s/30s,
which shows that the content of a photograph could be different from the subject.
But I re-engaged with the banana-images in a different way last month – different feelings and a different interpretation; intense colours drawing you into the small, intense space immediately before me, by the bridge I was standing on.
What Promise for the Day to Come?
Dawn light in Amsterdam
What I've learnt is that fine art photography gives me a canvas to show how I’m feeling now, as much as how I was feeling when I first captured the image; it gives me the means to mix the two and let their echoes intermingle.
Looking back in the midst of lockdown, I struggle to re-imagine the canal as a church; instead it's the intensity of my experience in Amsterdam which I'm responding to (it was my first time abroad after a gap of 20 years), a feeling which resonates with the current context – the acute intensity which Covid‑19 generates; the heightened awareness, so fierce that I'm not sure I'm even breathing properly.
But I’m very aware that this is an interpretation of today. Part of me fears that, in a year or so (when life has hopefully settled to a new, less stressful normality), I’ll look back at this image and be critical; forgetting how I’m feeling now, I'm afraid I’ll see this image as overblown, extravagant, pretentious.
But for now, it’s just exactly right.
It’s saying what I need to say.