Landscaping

 Having gone through my files looking for "landscape" photographs taken in the past five years (playing by the "let's pretend" rules of the LPOTY game), I've been having fun mocking-up the better finds into the sort of uniform, embossed-card mount presentation you see in museum collections. As you might imagine, I've got an awful lot of candidate landscape-ish files, and it has been instructive to see how many rejects and passed-over images from just a couple of years ago are now looking much more interesting than their more obvious stand-out neighbours.

I suppose my ideas of "interesting" are constantly evolving, but I have also found that the idea of defining a selection of pictures in opposition to and in contrast with the sort of thing that wins photography competitions can clarify and refine precisely what makes my work "mine", and not just yet another anonymous contribution to some collective, box-ticking beauty contest. I have also come across a surprising number of these "anti-landscapes", where a wall, fence, or some other barrier stands between the viewer and whatever prospect lies beyond. No doubt a psychologist or psychiatrist could tell me what that is all about.

It amuses me, too, how these sombre, institutional-style mounts lend an extra gravity to the pictures: these are not just photographs, these are Victoria & Albert Museum collection photographs! So please put on these white cotton gloves when handling them. It has also been a useful exercise, fitting the images into a standard aspect ratio: that opportunity for a second crop often seems to concentrate and "reduce" the image, in a culinary sense. Rather like photography itself, museum-style presentation is all about isolating a little window of attention, and creating a permanent object of contemplation out of a scrap of time and space that some habitual elbow-tugger like me thought worthy of your notice.

There's easily enough good stuff to make yet another Blurb book there, maybe several, or even an exhibition, if only I could interest some gatekeeper in the work of a sixty-something, professional class, white, hetero, cis-male photographer. Which, once you put it like that, is unlikely. Besides, in 2018, I approached another similarly sixty-something, etc., university retiree, Stephen Foster – with whom I have spent many hours in various committee meetings, who used to run the in-house John Hansard Gallery, is a mover and shaker in the local art world, and who has in the past made encouraging noises about my photographs – to see if he could suggest anyone who might be interested in my photo-collage work. In 2019, to jog his memory, I gave him a copy of my Prestidigitation "best of" sampler to look at. In the end, though, his response amounted to "I have no idea what these are all about, or who might be interested in them, sorry!". Which makes two of us, I suppose.

And yet, inexplicably, I persist. Why, you'd almost think I was some kind of self-willed outsider, a contrarian who thrived on rejection, fascinated as much by the wall between himself and ... Ah.

Hello? Yes, I'd like to cancel that appointment with the psychiatrist, please.