Mottisfont Abbey 2006

It is often said that it can be useful to leave off evaluating your photographs until you can see them as if they had been taken by somebody else. Certainly, twenty years seems to have been long enough to do the trick.

In summer 2006 I was still tinkering with a project photographing at Mottisfont Abbey, a National Trust property near Romsey in Hampshire. I had started the project a few years earlier, concentrating on the river Test that flows through the grounds, and using an old Agfa Isolette folding camera that used 120 medium-format film. This led to my first real solo exhibition, The Colour of the Water, which was on display in the Abbey for eighteen months, March 2003 - November 2004, and then – augmented with digital photographs – to my self-published book Downward Skies.

By 2006 I had acquired a Canon EOS 350D digital camera (eight megapixels!), and had broadened my attention to the whole of the grounds at Mottisfont. I ended up making a portfolio of monochrome images that, until very recently, I had forgotten all about. Looking for something completely different, out of curiosity I opened a folder labelled "Mottisfont" on a backup drive, and was amazed to see the work of this other person, who is apparently me aged 52 years.

So here is a little gallery of a dozen of those photos taken by that stranger. They are "as found". I wouldn't choose to make them that way now – too contrasty! Do something about those blocked-up shadows and clipped highlights! – but that's the whole point. This is how he liked to do it then, and why I find them so striking now. Not a bad effort, young man, not at all bad.

Hmm, I wonder if I might be looking at next year's calendar? There are plenty more to choose where these came from...