COMMENT
All images © Tim Clinch
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A FORTNIGHT AT F/8 Inspiration or explanation? This is the million-dollar question Tim Clinch asks this month as he recalls the seminal moments in his life in which one has consistently triumphed over the other.
ince the beginning of the dreadful time we are having in the coronavirus era, my life, like many people’s lives, has changed exponentially. As a photographer who specialises in travel, my work has all but dried up. Some of my main clients, both for commissioned work and for picture sales, were airline magazines, almost all of which
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have either paused publication during the pandemic or closed down permanently. The two or three wine magazines that I could rely on for commissions have similarly halted production and who knows whether they will return or not. My only hope is that in these desperate times most of us find that a glass of wine or two helps the situation along a bit, so fingers crossed. All is not lost, however, as
I have been spending a lot of my time on Zoom, where, alongside a great friend and photography colleague, Joanna MacLennan, I am holding weekly sessions talking, looking at and sometimes arguing about the wonderful world of photography and all that’s in it (see @ twophotographers2020 on Instagram if you’re interested). One of the questions that has been burning away in my brain
during all this has been the one at the beginning of this column – inspiration or explanation – and I realise that, for me, in my career as a photographer, inspiration wins hands down every single time.
I
t won the first time I ever set eyes on the photograph that changed my life and that I will take to my grave: Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange. I wrote a whole column about it a couple of years back. It won during the long and badly paid years I spent as an assistant, watching as several of the masters of their craft I was lucky enough to assist went about their business. The lesson I learned time after time was that planning was pretty much the key to everything in photography. Or, as Terence
THE PICTURES These pictures are all from the wine magazines I work for and go to prove that a wine shoot is not all bottles and glasses.
PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE MONTH In June 1954, at the age of 56, photographer Berenice Abbott set off with two companions from New York and drove south along US Route 1 capturing the road, its towns and inhabitants. From Florida motels made from buses to Maine potato farmers, Abbott memorialised communities up and down the east coast until they reached Key West in Florida. Once there, they turned around and retraced the route to its northern terminus at Fort Kent, Maine. While I love Berenice Abbott’s early work and her moving portraits of remarkable subjects such as James Joyce, Eugène Atget and Peggy Guggenheim, it is to her Highway 1 series that I return to time and time again.
