Dragging together “landscape” and simple “still life” images has been a real struggle, [...]]]> I have been putting some words together for an online magazine about my latest project “The Blast”, and thought that sharing some of them here might give more background to what I have been trying to do with this new work.

Dragging together “landscape” and simple “still life” images has been a real struggle, but something I had to go through to frame the work correctly (correctly in my mind anyway). Perhaps the hardest bit has been editing the hundreds of pictures down to ~60. One can’t show everything and after ten years that it difficult. With that in mind I have attached a few rejects to this post.

In 2015 (after a comment from a friend) I realised that my relationship to Blast Beach on the coast of Durham has informed and almost guided my practice for at least 6 years, and that I had to make a collection of pictures about the space. “The Blast” is where I have visited to gather materials for many of the camera-less works I have made during that time, and it is where I go to walk and think and explore, and I know the area intimately.

It took me years to see past the industrial pollution that blights the Blast, and to see the positive stories that slowly emerge. The passing of time and signs of environmental change are within the pictures for those who care to look in detail, and the decade long duration of this project has allowed me show that.

I wanted the pictures to be true to the place, and to present a collection that anyone familiar with the beach and the unique feel of the space would recognise. But hopefully these images are not just about one small part of the English coastline.

The Blast is a place where you pick things up, where you find things you can’t quite believe or don’t understand, and industrial remnants are revealed by the tides daily. But I did not want to photograph these objects in situ, this was done so well by Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen in “Coal Coast”, and I wanted to change the context of my finds and to explore them visually. I have always been fascinated by the objects we gather and how they can connect us to a place, and how they take on a value as a result.

Whilst walking the Blast I often wonder what would be left if our society ended today, and how our lives might be interpreted by the people of the future. How would they read the cultural objects they found scattered and washed up on the beach? How would they evaluate our relationship with our environment?

For more information on the project please click here.

Bonfire site 2013 and 2016

Cliff top pond June and August 2016

Reed bed after arson in May 2016 & 3 weeks later in June 2016

The first image from 8 hours photography - May 7 2016

Oxide pool with floating debris 2013

What better way to start 2016 than with these two shorts clips about Trent Parke

I could spend many happy hours with his artist’s books.

Bruce Davidson

Masao Yamamoto

Over the last month I have been considering the role of beauty in my images. Some of my recent work has been created to be intentionally beautiful, with warm seductive colours, even when the subject matter, [...]]]> A Happy New Year to everyone who subscribes to Dark Matters, and also to those who drop by.

Over the last month I have been considering the role of beauty in my images. Some of my recent work has been created to be intentionally beautiful, with warm seductive colours, even when the subject matter, upon closer inspection, has been far from that. Often I have found that it takes a whole raft of things (such as colour, saturation, texture and shape) before something feels that way, and of course beauty is such a personal and subjective quality.

As I have previously alluded to, I have wrestled with “beauty” for many years, and the elephant in the room only gets larger as time goes by. Sometimes I conveniently forget that this mysterious concept was one of the reasons I began to photograph in the 1990’s, inspired by the wild nature of the North-West Highlands of Scotland.

In an effort to better describe what I do, I re-read Robert Adams’ essays in his book “Beauty in Photography”, and he says this…

“…the word beauty is in practice unavoidable. Its very centrality accounts, in fact, for my decision to photograph. There appeared a quality – Beauty seemed the only appropriate word for it – in certain photographs and paintings that opened my eyes, and I was compelled to learn to live with the vocabulary of this new sight, though for year I still found it embarrassing to use the word Beauty, even while believing in it”.

I fully understand his illogical embarrassment, and even recently allowing colour back into my own pictures felt like a dangerous step towards beauty, and worse towards “pretty”. Although these terms are often unavoidable in any visual art.

Adams goes on to say, “If the proper goal of art is, as I now believe, Beauty, the Beauty that concerns me is that of Form. Beauty is, in my view, a synonym for the coherence and structure underlying life….William Carlos Williams said that poets write for a single reason – to give witness to splendor… It is a useful word, especially for a photographer, because it implies light – light of overwhelming intensity. The Form towards which art points is of an incontrovertible brilliance, but it is also far too intense to examine directly. We are compelled to understand Form by its fragmentary reflection in the daily objects around us; art will never fully define light.”

Adams mention of light here is important, as it was that which really motivated me to pick up a camera all those years ago. How many times have we photographers stood outdoors, and commented “look at the light”, or merely “waited for the light”, even leaving a location because “the light was poor”. And often we do this with an amazing landscape around us, as if that by itself was not enough for us, as if that was the insignificant part and not what we came for, merely a stage for the light to sweep across, for it to make beautiful.

Perhaps as Robert Adams suggests it is light that is at the root of all this, somehow inseparable from what we describe as beauty. It is light that allows us to see shape and form, it defines line and texture; yet it is even more elusive, as we can never even begin to describe its intensity (or splendour) within an image.

Robert Adams – “Beauty in Photography: Essays in Defense of Traditional Values”. Published by Aperture

During the last year my attention has been drawn away from this blog, largely as I have concentrated on my portfolio and reviews. In March I visited Format Festival in Derby, [...]]]> As WordPress seems to be sending out old blog posts at random, I thought it was time to send one that is intended.

During the last year my attention has been drawn away from this blog, largely as I have concentrated on my portfolio and reviews. In March I visited Format Festival in Derby, and then in July I was lucky enough to go to PhotoIreland in Dublin with my work.  Even though the Irish trip meant re-printing most of my portfolio just so it physically fitted within the airlines hand-luggage policy.

Since 2008 I have had several “camera-less” projects burning away in the background, and last year these have really taken over my practice. There is more information about what I have been doing over at Shutterhub.

Many of these images are abstract or hard to read, and putting these into the public (and professional) domain has been a real challenge to me, as not everyone gets what they are seeing. I find it odd how we will accept abstraction in a painting much more readily than we do in a photograph, besides why do we have to immediately understand everything we see? But I like the fact that people engage with and interpret the images in their own ways, even though some cannot see past the point when they discover that I haven’t used a camera or a lens to create most of my new work.

My own natural tendencies are to experiment, to constantly evolve and to keep learning “new” skills, always trying different ways of making images. So during 2014 I have really had to curb my natural instincts whilst trying to pull together coherent bodies of work, some of which have already been going on for 6 years, rather than spin off onto something else. It is so tempting to see a collection of images as finished after just a few months, but is anything ever complete? I guess I don’t want to ever say that I wish I had stuck at a particular project for longer.

Something I have found particularly compelling about my current imagery is that the prints are by nature very seductive, even beautiful, although I struggle with that word. The technology I use to create them responds to items that are contoured very differently to a camera, and the resulting prints are not as two dimensional (flat). I have even had people touching a print to see if there is a physical edge or ridge on it, which is unusual (a bit annoying too, as I rarely handle my pictures without gloves). But these pictures are made to be hung on walls and enjoyed, so I can tolerate the odd inquisitive fingernail raking their delicate surfaces!

Spore Print 2014

I hope you find the time to see more new images at www.rogercoulam.com

]]> http://www.rogercoulam.com/blog/2014/12/abstraction/feed/ 2 http://www.rogercoulam.com/blog/2013/08/3-days-in-burgerland/ http://www.rogercoulam.com/blog/2013/08/3-days-in-burgerland/#comments Fri, 02 Aug 2013 12:59:25 +0000 Roger Coulam http://www.rogercoulam.com/blog/?p=2633 A new collection of images has been added to my website here .

3 Days in Burgerland casts a hard glance at the Sunderland Airshow.

I hope you will find the time to take a look at the other 70 images in the series, and as always your feedback and opinions are welcomed.

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