A tale of two books

Good things come to those who wait, and this is especially true when pre-ordering books.

Two such books arrived through the mailbox recently, both very different, but in other ways intrinsically  similar. This is my review of them

Solargraphs by Al Brydon

JW Editions 2019

For those of you who don't already know, a Solargraph is photography stripped back to its very basics. It consists of a piece of photographic paper strapped to some sort of housing, normally a beer can, and a rudimentary pinhole lens made in the front. It is then left somewhere with a view of the sun for 6 months or more and a vague image largely consisting of the sun as it tracks across the sky.

I've had a go myself, and I find it, compared to normal photography very cathartic due to the fact that there is little to do once they cameras have been made and installed rather than wait and hope for the best.

I got to know Al Brydon's work when I visited  his exhibition together with a number of other artists at the Argentea gallery in Birmingham as part of the Inside the outside exhibition. The truth is that I was intrigued by the the fact that Solargraphs could anything other than a play thing and the idea that they may have some commercial value never occurred to me. In the gallery, they were printed on large silk sheets in a way that brought out the shape and tones of the finished work.  When I saw that he was going to create a book of his solargraphs I knew I needed to have it.

In many ways the book is quite different to the prints I saw in December. Solargraphs generally are dark, and matt paper tends to emphasize this, but in other ways the images become less a simple image of the sun but something more elemental and foreboding.

In his forward, Al emphasizes two aspects of Solargraphy  that attracted it to me in the 1st place. Firstly was its very randomness. The more I get into photography, the more I find myself rebelling against the nature of photographic control. Some photographers seem only happy if they can manipulate  the very pixels themselves, while to me achieving such perfection is akin to death itself, being both cold and soulless. Apart from where you place your beer can, you have absolutely no control over the final image. In fact many of the most intriguing images are those that have been somehow distorted by the effects of long weather exposure.

The other aspect is playing with the nature of time. Maybe its my background as a physicist, but I have always been intrigued by how we can use photography to explore how we perceive time, from freezing an instant, imposing two points of time on top of each other or smearing time across seconds, minutes or in the case of Solargraphy days and months. In a way a solargraph shows how the world appears to a tree, tracking the sun as it transits the sky across the year. and some of the most intriguing images are those taken in forests, with the sun shown against the silhouettes of trees. I had originally eschewed forestry areas for my solargraphs, not wanting the track of the sun to be interrupted, but I know realise that the very obstruction that defines the image, not the sun itself.

Many of the images show the effects of water damage. Normal photographic rules would indicate that these were to be discarded, but in this case nature itself is the artist and they add a intriguing texture onto the image.

As Al says in his forward however, you cannot approach these images as photographs, but instead as an abstraction. The images and shapes although hewn from the real world, create images that allow us to cast on their own emotions. I found the images to be be quite dark and foreboding, a bit like when you find yourself lost in directionless forest.  The pockmarks and water stains at the same times talks to me of decay which is a reminder that one of the natures of time and universe is that order and life is not a natural state and all things end.

My only real criticism of the book is that I would of liked perhaps more explanatory text of both the process and why these images were chosen. However this is a book with hidden depths using a process which seemingly simple is capable of creating huge complexity.

Abstract Mindedness by Doug Chinnery

Kozu books 2019

I have always felt that I discovered Doug Chinnery. Yes, he had been around for long before I became aware of him, but I am proud of the fact that I was drwan to his work well before I became aware of the artist.

Let me explain

I was wandering around Bakewell in 2016 and I wandered into a photographic exhibition. On one side was the usual set of images, perfectly composed, created and photo-shopped to an inch of their lives. On the other was a set of B&W images of woodland, random and blurred. I can't remember any of the images of the 1st set, but the woodland images have stayed with me today and obviously had a great impact on me and how I felt about photography.

This was before I started on my photography education, and before, via social media, I came to realise that Doug, together with his partner in crime, Valda Bailey had for many years been both educators and pioneers through light and land tours and experimenting in using the camera as more than a tool to record objects and more as a tool for self expression. So when Doug announced a book, I did not hesitate to put my order in.

For Doug however, the book is not a simple exersise in cataloging work. As he has himself bravely documented, Doug has in recent years been suffering with mental health issues. Even the term mental health can be terrifying to some, suggesting some sort of wide eyed madness, but in truth it is a term that is often abused and covers a huge range of conditions, suffering a wide range of people. In Doug's case it consisted of deep depression, which is debilitating enough for anyone, but for someone who's livelihood is an artistic endeavor, it can be crippling.

Often doing art,  as long as it is removed from the pressure of completion can be therapeutic and as Doug writes in the forward, often just partaking in a creative process  has been enough to keep the black dog at bay for at least a few hours. I have always been intrigued by how art and the mental process is linked. Some of the artists I admire most had there own issues. People like Van Gogh, Edvard Munch  and Carl Federick Hill all struggled with mental health issues, and it is an intriguing question on how there condition affected their art. That is not to say that mental illness is a requirement to create great art, or having a mental illness means you will be a great artist, however by studying the nature of the illness, it may provide an insight on how it is that some people can escape the rigors of the banal and create truly original art work.

You would expect that having to complete the book while suffering from depression, that it would consist of dark and forbidding images, but very few fit that category. In many ways the images are the opposite of the Solargraphs, being colourful, light and bright. Strangely only what you might call traditional landscapes have a dark, mournful quality. In fact one of them is to me the most powerful expression of depression. It consists of a mountain, dark against a grim sky, with only the summit lit and on the the right just appearing out of mist is a hint of rainbow just appearing.

Most of the others images  range from abstract to just expressive. However each is masterwork in the use of a camera as more than a instrument of recording to a true creative tool and they would not be out of place if you saw them hung in a art gallery.

Accompanying the images are verses composed by Doug himself. Doug is dismissive of the quality of his poems, and I do not have enough knowledge to comment one way of the other. However, they have a honesty and poignancy that adds an extra dimension to the images they share a page with.

In many ways this book has a more important purpose than purely as a showcase of Doug's work. This book is another small step in bringing how we deal with mental health issues from the shadows where it has lain, into the light so that it can be dealt with in a mature way, offering sufferers the support they need and ensuring that the conditions can be diagnosed and treated early. As someone who was directly affected by a relative with mental health issues when I was young, I know how important early treatment and diagnosis is. All the proceeds from the book sale have generously been donated by Doug to the young minds mental health charity.
 

A tale of two books

In many ways the photos in these books could not be more different. One is produced by the use of the latest in modern cameras and post processing techniques, the other by the most primitive of apparatus. One consists of images supremely generated and created  by the artist, while the other is left to the  randomness of nature itself. However strangely thing is when looking at each book side by side, some of the images could of easily of been transposed and you would of struggled to work out which was from which book.

Each book represents to me two opposite, but complimentary trends in modern photography. As cameras get more sophisticated and the intelligence in the camera increases, it becomes harder for a photographer to differentiate their work from all the other great images out there. There are two antidotes to this. Firstly as Doug has done, we can embrace the abstract, much in the same way as art was forced to do when photography allowed everyone to take realistic images. Secondly there is a trend the eschew the computer and move back to the analog, where the skill of the photographer is more important than the quality of there camera. These books show that either path can create similar expressive results and are equally valid.

Whatever trend you subscribe to, both books are fantastic editions to any photographers bookshelf, and if you can get a copy of either you will not be disappointed.