Percy's Perspective

The past few months since Michael Kenna published his exhibition dates, which featured a photo called ‘Percy’s Perspective’, I’ve been receiving many emails a day about it asking if the name of the image had any relation to myself.

Then yesterday, a piece appeared in the Guardian newspaper (Uk major tabloid), and Michael name checked me towards the end of the article. Again, I received a load of emails from folks telling me that Michael had name checked me.

I think it would be nice to give some context to this, and how it all came about.

If you are a regular reader of my blog, you will know that I have been a fan of Michael Kenna’s work since the late 80’s. He is one of my influences for sure. You just need to look at my work to see it. I have no problem citing my influences and I owe Michael Kenna a terrific debt to showing me the way forward. I know my style of photography wouldn’t be what it is without him.

So consider that back in 2009, when I was just starting out as a photographer, I emailed him to ask for some advice regarding gallery representation, and I got a reply. I specifically remember Michael saying “your work is very beautiful, congratulations” (I should perhaps point out that from my dealings with Michael, he is extremely polite and above all else, highly encouraging).

Since that email in 2009, I’ve met him around three times, and on all occasions it was a lot of fun. The last time being in 2020 when he invited me to a Karaoke party he was having in Tokyo (he knew I was in town - and knew I had never done Karaoke before). I must admit that I was apprehensive about doing karaoke, but also knew I would regret not going.

The Karaoke was an excellent night. Despite my terrible singing, and not practicing as I had been instructed to do by Michael (he is a well practiced Karaoke singer and had prepared a Bruce Springsteen number which he did very well). His agent also did an amazing version of Bowie’s ‘China Girl’.

This brings me to the fact that I was in Japan because I run a yearly winter Hokkaido tour. This is where the connection to the photograph above comes in. I only went to Hokkaido because I was drawn there by Michael’s beautiful work. I share his guide. The tree above is one such location that Tsuyoshi found while I was with him back in December 2015.

I can’t really say it’s my find. Tsuyoshi found it for me. But I do love the location. It is one of my most favourite places to visit in Hokkaido.

Had someone told me back in the late 80’s, that one day I would not only spend some time with Michael, but that I would also have an image named after me, I would not have believed it possible. But it did happen, and photography seems to surprise me every now and then with where it takes me.

I’d like to finish by also saying that Michael’s gesture of naming the image after me is quite playful, but I think he also likes to acknowledge any connections that he makes along his photographic journey. He’s a nice fellow. The world is an exciting place for him, and you sense it when you’re around him.

Perhaps the biggest give away from this is to practice your Karaoke. As you never really know when you’ll need it.

Michaels new retrospective book is available this November and from what I can see of it so far, there are written descriptions of the making of each image within the book.

A private endeavour

This video mirrors my own views very much about why we create photographs, and what is most important in tending our creative lives.

I have for many years now, thought that photography is actually a very private endeavour. We do it because we cannot not do it. We do it because it enriches our experience of life in some way that, if we didn’t do it any more, we would feel something was missing.

And yet it is very easy to get a bit lost. To start to believe that we are making images to build an audience, or to show others what we saw. I never first picked up a camera for any of these reasons, and neither did you.

I think it is always worth trying to reconnect to your very first impulses for buying a camera and making images. In this video, we see that Vivian Maier made images for one sole reason: because it provided something in her life that she would have been lost without.

I really do think that photography is a private endeavour. I know that might seem like a huge contradiction from someone who foolishly listened to his friends when they said ‘you should go professional’. If I were not running a photography business, I would be perfectly happy now, not having a website and not sharing my work. I’ve been though 14 years of having people tell me all sorts of nice/weird/wonderful things about my imagery. As variable as the feedback has been, there has always been one constant: and that is me. I make images for myself, and you do to, and to believe otherwise is a deception.

If you go back and think about why you picked up a camera in the first place, then you will understand what I mean.

Driving onto the Langjökull glacier

My guide in Iceland always takes me on the science route :-)

I had a nice time in Iceland last week. Here I am on the langjökull glacier.

Emotional 'reading' vs Cerebral 'reading'

Dave Hinton, one of my tour participants this September, sent me this photograph. Apparently the two people in it (click to enlarge) are one of the other tour participants and myself.

I really enjoyed looking at this photo as it helps convey the scale of the Icelandic interior. You won’t bump into other photographic tourists or tours here for sure, and even if you did, it would be rather silly if you were all trying to photograph the same thing. There’s more than enough to go round.

View fullsize

Myself and a participant on my recent Iceland interior tour
Image © Dave Hinton, tour participant September 2023.

Scale is one of the most difficult things to convey in a photograph. I remember on a workshop in Skye, one of my participants asked me if we would be photographing ‘the island’ rather than compositions of parts of a landscape. I asked him what he meant, and he told me his wife had asked him ‘yes this is all very good darling, but what does the island look like?’.

It was a valid point.

How do we convey the sense of a vast place, or an entire island in just one photo? Can it be done? (I think if it can, it would be very hard). Vista shots rarely work because although everything is in the shot, all of it is too far away, and there is no one single focal point of the shot. Everything is there, yet everything is lost. Similarly with arial shots of an entire island. You might get a sense of the shape of the island, but you can’t really make out specific aspects of it.

I sometimes think we wish to be all-seeing, all-present. We wish to capture ‘all’, and convey ‘all’. Yet, this is too much to attempt, and if we did accomplish it, the viewer would be unable to process it. I think that is why generally speaking, successful landscape are often a subset of a place.

I think trying to convey scale in photographs only works on a cerebral level and not on an emotional level at first glance. The picture above is beautiful for the general composition of the peaked hill side and the horizontal tones flowing through the panorama. The small figures in the centre are what I would call ‘easter eggs’ - features you see secondly. Therefore, this photo is first accepted and taken on an emotional level by enjoying the sweeping tones and atmosphere of the landscape. It is then taken on a cerebral level when we notice the two figures. That is when we context switch from emotional to cerebral. We are now analysing the size of the figures against the backdrop of the vast Icelandic landscape, and we cannot help but compute spacial distances and figure out that this landscape is huge.

But there always has to be that context switch from emotional to cerebral. We cannot enjoy scale and beauty at the same time. Beauty is emotional. Scale is a cerebral effort.

I believe that ‘reading’ (looking at) photographs sometimes requires a mixture of the two : sometimes we are emotionally reading while other times we are cerebral in our reading. We move between the two as we continue to look at a photograph that has beauty and scale in it.

I suppose what I’m driving at, is that emotional and cerebral viewing are independent of each other, and never shall they meet. When we have to shift gears to look at the picture another way, any emotional spell that was cast upon us is now in danger of being thrown aside, or at the very least interrupted, in the pursuit of understanding scale.

More a rhetorical question than anything, I wonder which is best? A photograph that keeps us rooted in the emotional at all times, or one that allows us to find a second underlying theme, such as scale?

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Many thanks to Dave Hinton for allowing me to reproduce his thought provoking image on this blog.