David Ward

What attracts me to Intimate landscapes?

There is a mystery wrapped in every photograph. Each is unquestionable proof of an individual point in space and time; they are true. And yet they lie. They have the power of allusion, the power to transcend their subject. For me, photography isn’t about the subject, this is just raw material. What matters is how photography changes our perception of the world. Every photograph is a transformation and I’m intrigued by how making an image effects this change and how this affects the viewer.

The intimate approach has several beneficial consequences.  It has often been observed that the art of photography is essentially about abstraction, both in the sense of an extraction of information and the Modernist sense of concentration on form, geometry and light.  The selection of an area framed in the camera extracts that selection from the greater reality, and the resulting rendition in a two dimensional form reinforces this abstraction, this divorce, from the 'real world'.

A successful photograph, be it a vista or on any other scale, is a distillation, the reduction of the chaos of our wider experience to an easily digested and visually satisfying essence where what is excluded is as important as what is included.

As John Szarkowski put it "To quote out of context is the essence of the photographer’s craft. His central problem is a simple one: what shall he include, what shall he reject? The line of decision between in and out is the picture’s edge."

Intimate landscapes imply a certain feeling of being enclosed, but do not deny the existence of the wider world, rather they can allude to it. Through a careful choice of content and framing allusion can be a powerful tool allowing us to infer a world, which lies tantalisingly out of reach, surrounding the chosen frame.

A tip from David

Always be yourself; unless you can be Batman, then always be Batman!

Seriously, there’s no point making images that follow the latest fashion if you don’t actually truly feel something about those subjects. “In the style of” simply doesn’t cut it when it comes to making Art or art. There have been many, many schools of painting over the last couple of hundred years, with innumerable adherents, but the only practitioners who still stand out are those who truly believed in the aesthetic or philosophical values of that school. There have always been hangers on who wanted fame or fortune by association but only the devoted were able to innovate and take their art forwards.

Far too often "stylism" is confused with style. The former is characterised by overriding concern with form and surface gloss for their own sake. If we want to make art we mustn’t get caught in the trap of thinking that dung rolled in glitter is anything more than dung. True style, on the other hand, is the ultimate expression of an artist’s intellectual and emotional concerns. Form in an image, as in a well-designed object, should follow on from function rather than fashion. Trying to show the subject in the simplest and most powerful way will inevitably give rise to appropriate form. (By the way, when I refer to ‘subject’ I don’t simply mean the object photographed. The subject of a photograph is the totality of the meaning within the image. This, of course, encompasses the description of a portion of reality but, crucially, it also includes the themes, ideas and symbols enclosed within the frame by the photographer. A picture of a tree isn’t always just a picture of a tree!)

Fundamentally, artists need to be true to themselves and not follow the herd.