Arguments with the picturesque – quoting from nature
Chris Tribble
Photographs do not translate from appearances. They quote from them. (John Berger[1])
I have been asking myself questions about how to do photography in the Lakes for some time. Do we need another view of the Jaws of Borrowdale at sunset? How do I stop my images from being merely picturesque?
When I came across Berger’s discussion of photographs as quotations it offered me a way of escaping from the idea of making photographs of "the view from…", and helped me to start to take a very different approach to photographing the landscape from the one I had originally envisaged. The work shown here is the outcome of this different way of working.
The first set of quotations in this exhibition is a series of 16 black and white images of the things that are not typically the focus of landscape photographs; the border between land and water, the roots and leaves that people in their thousands have walked over, the briefest reflections of leaves or sky. The camera has a unique capacity to capture the detail and beauty of these fragments, and to remind us of what the landscape is actually made of, and how fragile it is. The second set of quotations is a more conventional social documentation with three colour photographs of people looking at the landscape, and three others which are of people in the landscape. This series of images offers an account of some of the ways we interact with the landscape when we (along with hundreds of thousands of other visitors) visit the Lake District, looking for the same kinds of recreation which Thomas West encouraged in 1778.
These images have become a way of realising my own particular response to the Lake District as I have experienced it at West's viewing stations, and, I hope, it has given me a way of telling new stories which will encourage others to find their own points of view and to reflect on how we engage with these landscapes in a time of rapid change. In telling these stories I hope that I have been truthful in the way that Ruskin proposes in Modern Painters, and that the images "give ideas of truth, though it be in no degree the imitation or resemblance of those facts".
[1] Berger, J. & J. Mohr. 1982. Another way of telling. London: Readers & Writers