Visual Art Group Monograph 2020

VISUAL ART MONOGRAPH 2020

Paul Gallagher ARPS

EDITOR: Linda Wevill FRPS (lindawevill@gmail.com)

DESIGNER: Paul Mitchell FRPS (paul@pmd-design.co.uk)

Visual Art Group Monographs are produced by the Royal Photographic Society Visual Art Group and are provided as part of the annual subscription of the Group. © 2020 All rights reserved on behalf of the authors. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder. Requests for such permission must be addressed to the Editor. The Royal Photographic Society, RPS Visual Art Group and the Editor accept no liability for any misuse or breach of copyright by a contributor. The views expressed in this magazine do not necessarily reflect the policies of the Royal Photographic Society or of the Visual Art Group.

VISUAL ART MONOGRAPH 2020 Paul Gallagher ARPS

I suppose we all have a photographic journey that begins somewhere. For me, I am not entirely sure where that was but I knew from a young age that communicating visually seemed to be important to me. I loved art, and still do, but my journey into photography was not by me choosing it, it chose me. I had every intention in becoming a graphic artist and duly commenced on the two-year graphic design course at Southport College. Quite soon into this course, we began exploring all the genres of visual communication that we would encounter when we became qualified, one of which was photography.

One morning we were instructed to go out with some old, battered Praktica 35mm cameras and, rather than simply ‘have a go’, we had to return with pictures that conveyed vertical emphasis. Almost immediately I had an overwhelming sense of freedom.

There I was with a camera that I could point at anything and make a photograph that I deemed to have vertical emphasis. That afternoon came – and the second moment of revelation – when I was introduced to a dark room and printmaking. There too I had control of the entire process. I could print big or small, full of contrast or soft. It seemed to me that the plethora of variations gave me so many ways of expressing myself and so began my life-long exploration of making photographs.

The reason I did this was not to buck the trend, but because I had followed my lecturer’s advice to look at the photography books in the college library. This I did, and as you would expect, there were books by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. It was not only the sharpness of the images from the large format cameras that staggered me, but the tonality and three dimensionality they oozed. This began a journey in black and white photography that stayed with me for almost thirty years and literally changed the way I saw the world.

I chose black and white at a time when colour photography was very prominent in the eighties.

When I had completed my studies in Southport College I was taken under the wing of an enthusiastic careers worker who saw some real potential in the portfolio I showed her. Amazingly, during those difficult times of unemployment in Liverpool, she discovered an apprenticeship in a commercial photographic studio. This further fed my passion for photography and I felt like the luckiest youngster alive to be involved in and learning photography every day surrounded by large format cameras, dipping in and out of the dark room and drinking ridiculously strong coffee. The owner was Belgian and the studio smelled like a coffee shop and had a haze of smoke in the air from his constant cigarette smoking.

During these early years two very important parts of my life came together in a wonderful coalescence: photography and the outdoors. I was introduced to the wilder landscapes of the UK by my father who was always a keen climber. Some of the best times of my youth were spent getting out of Liverpool and escaping to the Lake District or Scotland. The coming

together of these two passions set me on a lifelong path that would take me around the world trying to put moments of time into photographs, a journey I am still on to this day.

As with all forms of art, it is incumbent upon us to allow change. Having embraced film for so many years, the introduction of digital photography was far from something I wanted to engage in, and, I must say, I avoided for some time. Inevitably the large format film cameras gave way to digital as the tide of technological progress became unstoppable along with the quality of photographs it could produce. This began with letting go of my darkroom as inkjet print quality was little less than phenomenal. This was quickly followed by my film cameras as the detail and tonality of digital cameras could no longer be ignored. As with all transitions, this influenced the way in which I made photographs. The main difference at this time was my exploration of colour photography once again. I always chose black and white film, but clearly with digital, the raw camera file is colour which I slowly began to delve into.

This process of allowing colour into my sphere of photographic communication took some time. As with a photographer embarking on black and white for the first time, we have to adapt to seeing in a different way and colour for me initially felt ‘too real’ and literal. With a transition, you have to allow mistakes, and from them, learn. Slowly I allowed myself to enjoy subtle colours and how they were indeed a part of the landscape. Strangely, one of the landscapes I found this process easier to enjoy was in Iceland. Being volcanic and largely monochromatic by nature, this helped nestle me in and colour once again became something I was able to turn to as a means of expressing myself. The most recent transition in my photography involved being approached by a company that converts digital cameras into infrared.

I politely agreed to try out one of their infrared converted cameras and report back, but in reality I had little interest as I had done this using infrared film when I was a student. Considering it had been so long since I had explored infrared, I searched the internet for examples of work and was presented with exactly what I thought I would discover, which was images of harsh contrast with bright white foliage and black skies with white fluffy clouds. In terms of black and white photography, this was about as far away from the subtle tonal palette I love as I could imagine, and, as a result, I hardly got the camera out of the bag.

This all changed one day in the remote Applecross Peninsula in Scotland whilst on a family holiday. I wanted to photograph an impending storm arriving over the Inner Sound from the Isle of Skye. The only camera in the bag was the infrared camera as I had absentmindedly left my full colour camera where we were staying. I decided to use it anyway, and back at base I inspected the file and began to process it. It was then I realised the wonderful subtle tones available to me in infrared (if I did the very opposite of what is recommended and photograph mainly in bright, sunny conditions). This turning point launched me into a digital world of black and white and one of new expression that still inspires me to this day.

The infrared camera now goes everywhere I go and very often comes out of the bag!

I am often asked where is the best place I have ever had the privilege of photographing over the years. Many expect my response to be a detailed account of being high in a mountain range in America or standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. The answer I always give is the Scottish Highlands. There are a number of reasons for this.

It was Scotland where I really learned how to see as a photographer. As many will know, the conditions are often very transient in Scotland and this taught me to understand the relationship between weather and light, and how light is directly modulated by the elements. Also in Scotland there are days when the light can be incredibly uniform and hidden

behind blanket cloud. On days like these I couldn’t simply make the ten-hour journey home to return the next day; I had to accept it, see the beauty in it and persevere. Along with this, the features of the landscape vary hugely. Mountains, glens and woodland give way to the vast tracts of open moorland and then coast with rocky bays and open pristine

beaches that are second to none. In the same way the features of the land vary, so do the seasons. For me learning, it had everything and began to feel like home and I spent every spare moment I had exploring its vastness. Even to this day, Scotland is a place I visit at least five times a year and familiarity has not led to repetition in my approach to

familiar places of this beautiful country, but a relationship that allows intimate exploration and a conversation through the medium of photography.

I feel very privileged to have travelled to many countries in the world doing exactly what I love, teaching landscape photography and making landscape photographs. As with any form of travel

this leads to many different experiences. I recall vividly the first time I arrived at Mesquite Sands in Death Valley as the sun began to rise. I remember walking into the sands as far as I could before the light turned too harsh, and recall the walk back only an hour later in the most intense heat I had ever had to endure to find the car thermometer reading 48oC.

The moment I first drove on Route 120 and turned the corner to see Yosemite Valley below me, with the mighty Half Dome completing the view, will be a memory I will carry forever. My thoughts whilst standing on that roadside were of college library books I had read cover to cover containing the work of Ansel Adams, and me trying to get somewhere close to the results in my home-made darkrooms. A close second to Yosemite was when I disembarked from the cable car on my first visit to Yellow Mountain in China, making my way to the edge of the precipice and witnessing the evening mists swirling between the 4000ft granite spires below me.

The depths of winters have always been a friend of mine. I have some of the happiest memories of experiencing the silence of winter in places such as Norway and Iceland, driving vast distances across frozen Canadian landscapes and walking on crystal clear frozen lakes through which you can see the metre-thick ice. I remember first arriving in Hokkaido, Japan, after a gruelling 32-hour journey and arriving at the edge of the Sea of Japan to see the drift ice plates grinding past each other. Hand in hand with winter landscape photography is witnessing the aurora borealis. I recall trying to understand what a hotelier was attempting to tell me before he led me through the hotel entrance doorway into a world illuminated by green northern lights gracefully waving in the skies above my head.

There are so many memories from many different moments within the landscape, and I treasure all of them. Experiences create emotions and they in turn feed into photographs. The photographs I make are what I am saying about any individual place and what it meant to me at that time. As I walk into a landscape I draw on these experiences and they remind me of how I have reacted to similar places in the past; this, without doubt, influences the photograph.

Something that caught the attention of a sixteen-year-old college student and changed his path in life is the very same path I follow now and has been followed through many landscapes in the world.

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