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I’ve been thinking about how infrequently you’ll see a person in my photographs. As a landscape photographer I tend to think that including a person is just cheating, not deliberately no doubt, but it represents a failure to engage with the actual subject itself - the land. https://twitter.com/robhudsonphoto/status/1310245471722631171
Not only that, including people can easily render the land as a backdrop or a prop, diminishing it. The empty land isn’t a complete truth, it’s almost all man made in the UK, including the bits people will most likely assume otherwise.
Nor am I the type of macho pillock that just has to go to the emptiest, wildest, most remote places because it makes me a bigger man. I learned years ago it doesn’t necessarily make the photography any more interesting by ringing such often repeated, tired themes.
I just photograph the land on my doorstep. It interests me by virtue of being there. Crucially (in normal times anyway!) its closeness is its accessibility, I can visit it regularly, immerse myself in it or less romantically just make work when I have time.
One of my jobs as a landscape photographer is to see the landscape for what it is. The other as a conceptualist and artist is to see the potential and possibilities - photograph not for what it is, but what it could be.
Some days those two jobs feel in conflict, on those days I don’t make pictures. Much of our job is in editing, a lot of editing is editing ourselves.
I hear some photographers say they want to remove themselves from their images. I’m not sure why, but my interest in the landscape is primarily how it relates to us as people.
I’m not a nature photographer and confess to having little interest in rocks, trees and grass in themselves. I do, accept that we are not separate from nature, we are of it and it is of us.
Crucially photographing how the land relates to us, how it talks to us, still doesn’t include having people in it. People dominate both the frame and the landscape, even if they’re quite small within the image, their presence is heavy/other.
Perhaps it’s just that people are too easy to read, I don’t know. The land certainly takes more effort for me, a different type or level of interaction.
Having said all that (I’m finally getting to the point!) there is a lot of what is technically termed ‘pareidolia’, or seeing faces in things in my photography.
I used to feel much the same way about that as having actual people in the images. It was only when I made my Mametz Wood series, where it was intrinsic to the meaning, that I came to embrace it.
I’ve also come to understand that one of my previous failings was to try to second guess, or anticipate what I’d see by looking harder and deeper at the land. Relying on what I already knew rather than opening myself up to the possibilities.
Remember seeing the possibilities is one of the jobs I’ve set myself as an artist. And I’m not trying to find some sort of ‘purity’ in my interaction with the land, I want the whole thing, light/dark, warmth/cold. It’s nearly always one or the other, rarely in between out there.
So yeah, I’m basically saying I’m a bundle of contradictions and that’s a good thing. We probably all are, and need to learn to embrace our contradictions because we’ll never even begin understand ourselves without doing so.
And if we don’t even begin understand ourselves then our understanding of how we relate to what’s outside of us becomes more strained. We’re strangers to each other and ourselves.
People in photography tend to forget this is one of the reasons they picked up a camera in the first place - to learn to navigate those waters between what’s in us and what’s out there.
