Innsbruck Revisited

Given the dearth of new photographs in recent weeks, I have taken up a long-postponed task, and have been taking a closer look at the files I brought back from my residency in Innsbruck during summer 2014.  It's interesting, what a difference the lapse in time can make.

The immediate standouts that got used in my blog posts, and were reused in the "blog book" I produced last year (A Tourist From Mars) still mainly work for me, I'm glad to say, but others have begun to come to the fore, now the actual experience is receding into memory, and I am able to see them with a more objective eye.  In particular, there are many images I dismissed previously as "untypical outliers" or, at the other extreme, as "too like my other work".  Some of these are much more interesting than they appeared at first glance, and reveal some consistent threads in my approach I wasn't conscious of at the time.  Amongst other things, I was clearly obsessed by the way the intensity of the southern sun in June reveals colour and texture in the plainest of walls.

Nonetheless, I'm not sure how much further effort I will put into this.  As I have said about other isolated sets of images -- our yearly visits to Wales at Easter, for example, or what amount to "holiday snaps" taken on other short visits --  they tend either to lack enough coherence, to be too few in number, or to cover too limited a part of the year to make a considered, coherent series in their own right.  There was initially some talk of a possible further exhibition, but on current showing this seems unlikely.

I actually have no idea how the summer exhibition was received, as I haven't heard a single word about it, positive or negative, from anyone since returning home in June, and must conclude that it was less successful than hoped.  In particular, there seem to have been no picture sales at all this time, which is both surprising and disappointing.  I have to say I thought it was a pretty good show, and that I managed to produce some outstanding new work from a brief 10-day residency in an unfamiliar location, but, too bad: if we waited on other people's opinions and responses, we'd never do anything worth doing.