Stone by Stone

Whether in a gallery, a premium photobook, or an Instagram carousel, a collection of pictures needs to function as a unified whole as well as hold interest on a picture-to-picture basis. It’s a similar complementary relationship between the micro and the macro that makes the art of building dry stone walls interesting to me.

Through a process of careful selection, attuned to the specifics of each stone’s placement and the contours of the wider landscape, it’s possible to build walls that can endure for thousands of years. What’s more, their strength is the product of a keen eye and good taste, not mortar or fastenings. Even though my work would be lucky to survive for decades, let alone millennia, I do want to learn how to assemble projects with the level of coherence, structure, and purpose that this scale of longevity requires.

Architects and Gardeners

“I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up.

“The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if they planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows. And I’m much more a gardener than an architect.”

—George R.R. Martin

At different times in my life, I have aspired to be an architect —  first literally, and later, figuratively. Around 13 or 14, I was drawn to the alchemy of architecture. It’s a magical idea — that you can transform a framework of lines on a page into something that you could live within and that might outlive you. (Ironically, I now work in reverse — I distill the complexity of the real world into mere shapes on a page.)

Street Portraits 1/100 — TJ

I love writing the newsletter to share what I’m thinking about and the media I’m enjoying, but I struggle to stay consistent when I’m busy shooting or editing. The point of greatest friction is trying to write and edit an essay for every issue. It’s hard to produce something inbox-worthy when my brain is elsewhere and my time is mostly spoken for.

I’d like to get an issue out the door every one to two weeks, so I’m going to remove the constraint of writing an essay for every issue. Instead, I’ll continue to send links to the best things I’ve read, listened to or watched recently, as well as pictures and perhaps a few lines on an idea or concept related to creative practice or attention that I’ve been mulling over.

Minimum Viable Everything

AA017 — Advice to a Young Photographer

I was asked recently what advice I would give to myself in my first year of photography — to sixteen-year-old Oliver. The more I thought about it, the longer the list became, so I thought that I would share it here in case it’s useful for anyone who’s trying to improve their photography. Rather than write it out as prose, I was inspired by Kevin Kelly’s posts — 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice and 99 Additional Bits of Unsolicited Advice to present it in list form. Good advice is specific to your situation, so I wanted to make it easy to blast through everything, pull out what resonates, and ditch the rest. No single concept below applies to all photographers and all styles of photography all of the time. Instead, this is an idiosyncratic list of recommendations for the kind of photography that interests me — documentary and portrait photography, often people-related and shot at close to middle distances. As much as this is advice for the photographer I was twenty years ago, this is also the advice that I need to hear now. These aren’t internalised rules that guide my every move — they’re prompts to shape me into the photographer I aspire to be.

When Shooting

AA016 — Flat Earth Theory

Skilled photographers learn to see the world like a camera, not through a camera. 

To the camera, the content of a scene is devoid of meaning. The lens focusses light onto a two-dimensional light-sensitive surface, and the sensor or film emulsion records the location, amount, and colour of the light that hits it. You can’t open up the aperture to let in more emotion, or use a fast shutter speed to freeze a mood. Merely pointing a camera at someone you love and tripping the shutter doesn’t guarantee that you’ll capture and convey your feelings about them in the picture that results. Unlike modern cars, cameras don’t come with automatic transmission.

AA015 — Absence

In the few weeks before my Gran died, someone asked me to tell them stories about her life. I was stumped. She’d been a part of my world from the beginning, and I realised I knew virtually nothing about her.

My Gran had been a teacher, but I didn’t know what or who she taught. I knew she’d married my grandfather, a Navy engineer on nuclear submarines, and that he’d travelled a lot — she’d had to raise her kids by herself for long stretches. He died around when I was born, so for me she’d always lived alone.

AA014 — Creative Navigation

I’m plagued by doubts throughout the creative process, but they’re particularly pronounced when I’m in between projects. What should I make next? Will it be as good as the last thing? Has it been done before? Is it bad? (Oh God, it’s definitely bad.) Am I going to die poor and alone? Worse — am I going to die poor and alone and unknown?

AA013 — DIY Learning

When I was seventeen, I walked out of school one morning and never went back. I walked down the long, tree-lined drive and out into a completely different life. As I walked, I slowed my pace and tried to focus on the experience — remember this, remember this — but I was so tired. I had spent the previous months in a fog; confused and unable to focus. The evening before, a doctor had diagnosed me with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and told me I should quit school, rest, and recuperate. When I walked into the Headmistress’s office, I couldn’t comprehend that not only was I ending my academic career, I had also annihilated the future I had taken for granted. From then on, I grew up out of time — no longer advancing in lockstep with my friends and peers, but making my own way, adrift on an ocean of possibilities. I felt both isolated and completely free.

After that day, I never took another academic class or sat another exam, but I never lost my love of learning. I suspect that some of my hunger for more information, skills, and experience was a misguided attempt to prove that I still had worth; that I wasn’t a failure. I still wonder how much of my self-definition as an autodidact is a defence against people viewing me as ignorant or uneducated. I was a voracious reader from a young age, but in my late teens and early twenties the reading was performative — books to impress before books to elevate. As I aged and became less reliant on external validation, my interests (rather than my personal PR department) began to direct my learning once again. Often, the time I spent learning about niche topics or refining useless skills didn’t produce any tangible value. And yet the process made me appreciate what’s possible given enough time and energy. In turn, this insight gave me a framework I could use to learn more practical skills when required.

Viewfinders

A camera’s viewfinder shapes the way you see and, in turn, the pictures you make. Beyond photography, your memories and identities create the viewfinder through which you experience your life. This viewfinder shapes the stories you weave and the memories you make.

Untitled, (Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973) by William Eggleston

The Ugly Stuff

William Eggleston returned from Paris feeling frustrated. He'd travelled there to follow in the footsteps of his idol, the French photographer Henri Cartier Bresson. Eggleston sought the emotion and humanity that Bresson had so decisively captured, but instead found a city so thoroughly documented by the master that it was impossible for him to see anything fresh.

Back in America, Eggleston lamented to a friend that he was at a loss for interesting subjects. Eggleston felt uninspired by their banal and ugly surroundings — there was nothing extraordinary for him to shoot. His friend stopped him and said, 'Shoot the ugly stuff'.

Musical Differences

I love to look at photographs, watch films, read books and listen to music. But while I take pictures, make films, and recently started to write for the first time since I left school, I feel like making music is off limits. I say that creativity is open to all and I think that anyone can learn to do anything better with practice (with certain headstarts conferred by innate ability or environment), so why don’t I apply that logic to music-making?

Lineage

Good Enough

Devotion

Family in the Frame

One of my favourite pictures is a black and white photograph by Emmet Gowin that shows two children, a boy and a girl, entwined in short grass. The boy straddles her, but is collapsed forwards so that they are chest to chest and ear to ear. He is topless, wearing only a pair of dark denim shorts. The curve of his neck traces the line of her jaw, while the fingers of her right hand rest lightly on the opposite side of his neck, the index finger on the back of his left ear, the little finger against his shoulder. She is wearing a white hairband and a few strands of dark hair have escaped across her forehead, stopping just short of her closed eyes. Blades of grass stick to his white back and limbs, and also to her thighs and calves. The dark and angular texture of the grass that surrounds them rhymes with his straw like hair, but contrasts with the soft, pale skin of their childish bodies.

I see an almost transcendent peace and abandonment in their repose; from her beatific expression, eyes closed, lips parted; to his surrender to gravity. However, it is the pull between tension and tranquility that elevates this image for me. Below the bliss, there is a sense that this scene is the result of something more dynamic, more aggressive. Their bodies suggest relaxation but also exhaustion, perhaps the result of a ferocious bout? Are they submerged in an embrace or are we looking at the victor pinning the vanquished? Her right hand lies so delicately against his skin, keeping him close; yet literally on the other hand, her left arm is pinned uncomfortably under his body, her left hand awkwardly trying to free itself at his hip. His left hand is balled into a fist, seemingly grasping the grass at her elbow; but is he pushing against the ground to lessen her discomfort at his weight, or is he pulling himself down, the better to hold her in place?

Emmet Gowin, Nancy and Dwayne, Danville, Virginia, 1970

In the Shadow of the Self-Image

The Voice in my Head

Photography in the Machine Age

From its inception, photography was a marriage between human and machine. The lens and the light-tight box allowed us to capture the light we saw in the wild. First we made life easier by using a mechanical shutter to expose the sensitised plate to light; this meant we didn’t need to uncover and re-cover the lens ourselves. Later, we subordinated responsibility for focus and exposure to the machine, and later still, during the rise of digital imaging, we gave the camera the role of darkroom too. At what point is the human no longer necessary? When does the machine assume the role of eye and brain?

Windows

Attention is the beginning of devotion —Mary Oliver

Welcome to issue 001 of Art & Attention.

I'm starting this weekly newsletter to give an insight into the process behind my pictures, to learn in public and to share things that I think are interesting. It's ostensibly about the interaction between creative practice and the application of awareness, two foundational areas in my life, but it’s going to be much less boring than that sounds. I’ll include links to the books, articles, podcasts and music I’ve been enjoying over the past week, along with ideas I’m excited about, great work by other artists, and useful tools and techniques.