1st April

I may be a fool for posting today of all days but here goes:

As some of you may know I am always trying to show movement in my work. I suppose this dates back to the time when John Blakemore (a wonderful English photographer) was making the first time exposures that I had seen ('All Flows') and later created movement through his ‘Wind’ and 'Lila" series. Many of these photographs were printed very dark with deep expansive blacks and shadow tones and few sharp highlights, or were printed very light with no deep blacks in the image at all! The variation in printing style he used was meant to accentuate the feeling of light, wispiness, movement or power. I have always been influenced by Blakemore’s work and make no apologies for it. His work opened my eyes to the possibility that a photograph could be more than an instantaneous capture of a transient moment, reproduced as a sharp, still image. A long exposure photograph is almost like a video made still. We know that there is movement but the image is still so the movement has to imagined or extrapolated. A good photograph always stimulates the mind to question, imagine, extrapolate or wander off in another direction. ‘Movement’ photographs have become very popular today and I think this is mainly due to the work of another English photographer, Michael Kenna, who uses long exposures frequently in his work. A whole group of ‘Kenna clones’ have sprung up over the last half a decade and I won’t name names but I will say that none of them seem to do it as well as Kenna does. I also worry that we are coming to accept visual plagiarism as original, valuable work. It’s good to be influenced by another artist but at some point ones pathway has to branch off and go its own way. Not all photographers who show movement in their work are plagiarists. The work of Cole Thompson here in Colorado and Alexey Titarenko in Russia spring to mind. Here are some examples of my own work that shows movement. If you think it plagiarizes the work of others then write in and let me know but be sure to have your argument ready with good examples!

Young Growth and Wind, Scotland 2007

Geneva Creek #4b

Milos #21, Greece

Milos #6, Greece