n/Nelson/Dean/White/Gill) 2007

 

High

(Sullivan/Nelson/Dean/White/Gill) 2007

 

Down beneath the swoosh of the turbines, the long grass blows in ripples
There's a beautiful spiral of roads that leads the lost up here
I was watching the birds taking off to swoop down over the city
They find and take just what they need and turn, turn, turn

 

The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing
The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing

 

That afternoon on Hustlergate with all the TVs flickering
While behind the sky was moving liquid crimson gold
Brothers, sisters, pay no heed to the unfaithful messengers
For theirs is a prison world of lies, lies, lies

 

Where the movers move, the shakers shake,

the winners rewrite history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing
The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing

 

The keening wind it blows through me, it blows through me
My time it must be almost done, be almost done

 

All these things you fear so much depend on angles of vision
From down in the maze of walls you can't see what's coming
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing
But from high on the high hills it all looks like nothing, nothing

 

 

 

If you ask some photographers,  the only difficulty in landscape photography is getting to the best viewpoint in the first place. From then on it’s slow and easy.

 

When Fay Godwin was once told that she was lucky to get the clouds just right for her photo, she retorted that luck had nothing to do with it – she’s waited for three days to take the photograph.

 

As Godwin rightly alludes, a landscape photograph is not a random snapshot. Often a huge amount of planning and expert knowledge goes into making the photograph. While it is certainly possible to get great photographs by  chance, it is not likely, and when looking at the work of the best landscape photographers, the element of chance is reduced to almost zero by knowledge.

 

Knowledge of the camera, and knowledge of the land.

 

It is easy to contrast landscape photography with other forms of photography such as fashion photography and ascribe relative values to the merits of different forms of photography. In the inverted values of modern society, things which generate profit are considered to be inherently superior of things which only have intrinsic or artistic value.

 

This work takes the view, deeply felt, that most of our society is ephemeral, but the land, while not fixed for all time, is a more or less permanent backdrop for most humans. As the lyrics above put it, ‘The movers move, the shakers shake, the winners write their history. But from high on the high hills, it all looks like nothing.’

 

For me there is a satisfaction, a joy, in exploring the landscape with a camera that I cannot achieve in any other form of photography. A great part of my cultural identity is shaped by the land I grew up in and knowing that I walk the same paths as my ancestors did thousands of years ago connects me to the past in a way that no TV programme or history book could possibly do.

 

I’m aware of course that the landscape changes over time, and sometimes very rapidly, but standing high on those high hills puts the transitory nature of human life into stark perspective.

 

These photographs are all taken in the UK from the Isle of Wight in the south, to Westray, part of Orkney in the far north. Mostly they represent the trips taken over two years, 2011 and 2013.  Living, as I do about as far from the sea as you can in the UK, many reflect my fascination with living on an Island as much as living in a mature, worked land, shaped by thousands of years of habitation and cultivation.