It’s been a lovely hot summer and I meet Bill Jackson on a day where the first downpour of August has drenched the London streets. We settle down in a cafe to discuss his project Biographica. Bill has been a LIP member for four years now and in the past year Biographica has been well received, with prints selected last year for the LIP Annual Exhibition (2009) as well as being awarded various other accolades within the photography arena. I find him engaging and as so often happens when photographers meet, many common thoughts and feelings on photography are shared and dissected.

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Biographica is part of a bigger project; it is a social, or rather a human document. Its focus is multi-faceted, portraying the relationship of people with people; people with the environment and the spaces they occupy. It also explores the land people live in, and the objects that belong to them. Bill Jackson’s passion for narrative is clearly shown with his combination of photographic images and text. This marriage of photographs with words has always been an important part of Bill’s work and his enthusiasm for storytelling traces back to his first memories, when at the age of 5 he saw his first projector film.

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‘All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’, becomes a real and tangible idea, driving Bill to frame the life stories around him. He frames up his subjects and the places they inhabit, to become a stage filled with props from the subject’s lives.

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Bill describes himself as a classical photographer with a strong purist identity and his 30 years of analogue experience has given him the discipline to work to high standards. He believes in working meticulously, planning his shoots to take up as little time as possible with the sitter. He’s of the mind that photographers hold a lot of power and with this, comes a huge amount of responsibility.

“Photography is heavily psychological, highly emotional and can have huge implications”, he says. “It’s a loaded gun, you’ve got to be sure of where you’re pointing it before you pull the trigger.”

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Biographica is a lifelong project, and marks Bill’s return to black and white photography for the first time since 1986. Back then he was shooting film and his work was heavily influenced by Diane Arbus who, it is speculated, documented her own suicide with her camera. Bill refers to August Sander and Matthew Brady as influences with the concept of documentation en masse. The works of Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Alexander Rodchenko and Mari Mahr are also a great inspiration, but Biographica has drawn from many sources including painting, especially works from the Dutch schools.

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For many years Bill explored ideas in video and electronic media and so moved into using digital equipment. Now for the Biographica pictures he uses available light, shooting a 5×4 Silvestri camera with a stitching digital back to create 180° panoramic images by stitching two exposures together. Each exposure generates an image with a very large file size of 2.5 gigabytes. This magnitude of capture supersedes anything a DSLR can produce, allowing for high quality reproductions to an incredibly grand scale. Of course creating such large files demands sophisticated storage solutions so Bill not only backs up on to external hard drives but also uses blue ray discs with their greater storage capacity over DVD’s. As a purist he keeps retouching to a minimum and does not employ any digital manipulation.

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His exposures are fairly long and can vary from 1 – 4 seconds, the sitters need to remain perfectly still for optimum sharpness, so for this reason he shoots a handful of exposures. To ensure they can hold their positions, subjects are usually seated and encouraged to relax into position. Bill feels that when you ask people not to move and to hold their position over a period of time, something happens to them in their bodies both physically and psychologically. He has employed long exposures in many of his projects over the years, with the idea that securing a lapse in time in a single frame challenges the concept of time itself. As a young photographer he got caught up in the idea of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Decisive Moment but as he has matured as an image maker, his mantra is more, grab whatever moment there is, secure it and pin it down.

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Bill would like to see photography returned to the photographer and taken out of the hands of the ‘Fine Artist’. He doesn’t see himself as a mainstream photographer, but rather as someone who is honest to himself and believes in pursuing his passion. We discuss how this is important to hold onto, especially when entering exhibitions and competition:

“When you enter your work into the public domain you have no idea how it will be received and there is no point second guessing either. It is fantastic when your work is selected and hugely encouraging, but it is important to remember that judges may not have a personal connection with your work, and if this connection doesn’t happen it is not a judgement on your work. The selection process can be as random as you or I deciding we want fish & chips for dinner instead of steak. Life is about selection, there are no guarantees or easy predictions. It’s not about winners or losers. Do what is true to you and be honest with yourself,” he says.

Bill admits that exhibitions like the LIP Annual Exhibition are good motivators as they provide you with a deadline to work towards. Selecting and preparing your prints for display and hanging them all together often helps you see the holes in a project, or areas that are particularly strong and deserve to be investigated further. It is also a good way to get feedback on new work, and for this year’s LIP Annual Exhibition Bill will be entering work from his latest project Bill and Gigiola.

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This new project holds many challenges for Bill personally as it looks back posthumously on the memories and events of his mother’s life and her marriage to his father ‘Bill’, who Bill Jackson never met. His father and mother came together during the German occupation of Italy during WWII. As a project it is highly personal in terms of subject matter and a challenge to Bill as he looks for a way to present it on an aesthetic level.

A few pointers from Bill for those embarking on personal projects:

• Shooting a personal project can teach you huge amounts in technique, from how to shoot the project to the final printing of the work. Research your ideas and look at how others may have approached similar projects.

• Plan out a methodology but allow for fluidity and adaptability.

• As an individual, every person you meet adds to your journey and, as a naturally shy and private person, a project like Biographica forces me out to engage with the real world. It is so easy and comforting to stay in your own private world which is not a healthy place to be in all of the time. In my early days as a street photographer, it was so much easier to be a voyeur that a conversationalist. A project like Biographica forces you to go out there and confront life and this makes you more human.

• Never be afraid to do a personal project, but be honest about it. Don’t worry about where it takes you and never never be afraid to fail. It’s through failure that we succeed. Remember for every so called successful picture there are 10 which you don’t ever see.

• Seek out a friend or mentor who can give you honest feedback on the work.

• Sometimes we need the distance of time from what we do. What you reject one day may be the image you select the next.

• Doing long term projects can be a daunting task and it can really stretch you. To avoid boredom, work on several projects at a time.

• Originality is a rare thing, so don’t get hung up on it but at the same time don’t just do a pastiche on something you have found. Challenge your motives for doing it. I like to see, in any art work an intelligence behind it.

• Try not to be pretentious about the work as others will see through it. Honesty is the best policy and more forgiving than articulated mumbo jumbo.

You can see more of Bill’s work at his website: www.billjackson.biz

And keep a look out on the LIP Website for the dates for his exhibition at the Viewfinder Photography Gallery in Greenwich where he is part of a group show called Home later this year.

Her project 66: The Story of a House tells the story of a family through the house they lived in. It started when Marysia’s mother was ill and Marysia wanted to document the house in which her family had lived for almost 60 years. When her mother died and the family had to sell the property, and Marysia wanted more than ever to capture the fact that is was more than a “house in need of modernisation”. It was a reflection of her family and told more about them and the times in which they lived than any photo album.

LIP: How did you come to photography and how long have you been using the medium as a form of expression?

Marysia: I was given a Kodak Retinette by friends for my 21st. I didn’t understand f-stops and apertures so joined an evening class, then set up a darkroom in a disused kitchen at the top of my parent’s house. Later I did a degree, one of the first, and about 10 years ago I studied for an MA in Multimedia Design which brought me into the digital age. Now I use both film and digital cameras and have a darkroom, although it’s currently in a local school where I teach one day a week. So we’re talking 30 years but it’s really only in the last few years that I’ve started to think about it professionally and develop my own practice.

LIP: This is a very personal project. How does it feel sharing your memories of your past family life and of your mother with the viewer?

Marysia: I was rather nervous about it at first. I was worried it might be too self indulgent but the initial responses I had were very positive; and more importantly most of them were about the viewer’s experiences or memories rather than mine. I’ve shown the work at different stages at LIP meetings, the Photographers Gallery portfolio evenings and at Rhubarb-Rhubarb’s Cultivate portfolio reviews. When people see the work, there’s always an image or two which resonates with them. They identify with it and tell me their stories. In my other life, I’ve worked a lot with life stories and on reminiscence projects so I understand what triggers are needed to enable people to feel comfortable to share their own stories. I didn’t set out for this work to do that, but I want it to tell a universal as well as a personal story and I think it does that.

My mother didn’t really understand why I photographed the house all the time. She couldn’t imagine why people would want to see the photos. But, that’s a bit like people who tell you they have done nothing with their lives and yet when they talk about their past it’s fascinating. Everyone has a story to tell and a way of telling it – mine is through photography.

LIP: Do you think this project has been a cathartic process for you?

Marysia: Definitely. When my father died about 10 years before my mother, I never had this impulse because my mother and the house were still there as the rocks in my life. I also still had my darkroom in the house and I sometimes slept over in my old bedroom which was frozen in the late 70s and still full of the books, toys and clothes from my childhood. So, as we cleared the house, I was re-viewing my life as well as dealing with the loss of my mother, father and home. The interesting thing was that my mother had cleared all my dad’s clothes but certain things, like the wires in the cellar, were very much about him and his presence in the house.

As the project progressed, I think I adopted a more detached documentary style and that allowed me to view the objects and fabric of the building more dispassionatly and less emotionally. Basically I accepted the loss we all experience at some point and was ready to move on. Obviously the photos have very personal memories for me. For example, the phone on the wall was in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs by the front door. It reminds me of long conversations with friends sitting on the stairs, wrapped in a coat because it was freezing – the house never had any central heating. It was placed there for privacy so my mother could gossip with her family in Scotland without disturbing my dad who never wanted the phone in the first place! But to those who look at this image it evokes a period of time and a certain kind of house that would have had that wallpaper. Someone recently bought a copy purely because their husband’s mother used to have that wallpaper!

LIP: Has the project been shaped in any way by critical thinkers in photography, and if so could you discuss what writings have bearing on your work?

Marysia: I’m not a great critical reader although obviously I did a lot of reading for college. I think perhaps the work I’ve done in reminiscence and my interest in oral history has a greater influence in this particular project. I’m thinking more of the work of Annette Kuhn, Geoffrey Batchen and others on cultural memory. This project prompted me to question how photographs help us remember. It’s easy to see a life in the snapshots in an album but those albums omit more than they show. It’s changing now, but in the past albums were handpicked special moments where everyone got on and everyone looked happy, rarely do you find photos of people at work or doing routine maybe boring things. The details of everyday life are lost. As we get older those selected images become a representation of our life, the key moments as if all the rest is of no consequence. I don’t agree with that. All those details are more or equally interesting. Of course, today in the digital age, we capture everything because we have the technology, so today we are faced with the question of how should we be editing what we shoot and how will this editing process influence the way viewers interpret the material in the future.

LIP: Some of the pictures included here have the sense of someone living in the space, such as the kettle coming to the boil, whereas others seem to be a document of an uninhabited space, like electrical cords. Was it a cognitive choice to combine both aspects when bringing the work together? And what difficulties did you find in the process?

Marysia: I’m still playing with how they work together. My mother was suddenly taken seriously ill and lay in hospital for 4 months. She defied all expectations, particularly the doctors’, and made a full recovery. She returned home and died 18 months later, as she wanted to continue living independently till the very end – up to the age of 87. I started the work when she was first ill as a way of coping with the daily visits to the hospital and the realisation that eventually the house, like my mother, would pass on to another life. I continued photographing the house with her in it but never of her in it. The evidence of the changes are there – handrails up the stairs appear and her bedroom moves to the ground floor. But the majority were taken after she died. When I first showed the work, it was after my mother’s first illness. Most people thought she had died and were amazed at how powerfully charged with loss those first images were. Sometimes the anticipation of an event is as emotional as the actual event. After she died, the photos become more a record of the dismantling of the house. I still just documented them – I rarely constructed shots – but I think my impulse to photograph had changed over the two years and so they have a different feel to them. This is partly why I’m working on different themed books. The two aspects may not actually appear together in the same book. I’d be interested to know what people think of how they work together. My one regret is that we sold a lot of items at car boot sales and I really wish I’d photographed those and some of the objects in their new homes. That would have been a different project about junk vs treasures and the lives of objects and maybe I’ll still do it one day.

LIP: Has your approach to 66: The Story of a House been influenced by the works of other photographers? If so who and how have they influenced you?

Marysia: I like photographers who capture the more mundane aspects of life in a fascinating visual way; reflections of specific communities or places. Photographers who immediately come to mind are Martin Parr, Chris Killip, Tony Ray Jones, William Eggleston, and Stephen Shore. I also greatly admire the work of Ori Gersht, particularly his project Liquidation where he captures the harsh history of a place in stunningly beautiful images.

LIP: Is it now a completed project, and do you have any plans to exhibit the work?

Marysia: The photography is now finished. There was a natural cut-off point when the house was sold. I did go to the house as it was being renovated and I took a few photos. It was very good closure for me as I no longer think of the house as ours, but I don’t feel those photographs belong in the main project. Well, maybe one or two – like the hand writings on the plaster walls when the wallpaper was removed showing dates of decorations and the heights of me and my brother as we grew; but the rest represent a new phase in the house’s history in which I’m not involved. And yes, I’m planning to exhibit the work at the Viewfinder Photography Gallery as part of a group show on the theme of ‘Home’. The dates may change but it’s currently scheduled for November. I’m working on a number of handmade books on different themes and a short digital narrative of the house. I’ll also self-publish a book on Blurb unless any kindly publisher wants to pick it up!

LIP: What are you currently working on?

Marysia: My current project is inspired by my father’s history. From 1942, he fought with the 1st Polish Independent Parachute Brigade based in Fife. In 1939 he was captured by the Russians and spent 18 months in a Siberian labour camp. When Russia joined the Allies, Poles were released and allowed to form their own army to help fight Germany. Poles were fighting for their homeland but along the way helped the Allies defeat Germany. Their ‘reward’ was a Poland under communist control to which many, including my father, could never return. Since 2004 we’ve seen again a great influx of Poles. This time they’re seeking work, very different reasons for coming to the UK than those in the 1940s. Many are now returning to Poland, and as they do it seems an opportune moment to reflect on that previous wave of Polish migration. They had to fight and they had to stay in the UK. They had no choice. I’m currently on a residency in Fife exploring the places the Polish army lived and trained when they were charged with defending the east coast from possible invasion by sea. I’m mainly photographing derelict buildings and landscapes. I want to capture something of the harshness of those times and the strength and fears of these young men and women. Their courage and sacrifices helped Britain and their contribution should never be forgotten.

LIP: How long have you been a member of LIP and do you feel your membership has helped you in anyway with your photography?

Marysia: I’ve been a member for about 4 years. I’ve only been to a couple of London events but I try to attend the Greenwich Satellite group as often as I can. It’s a very supportive network and the feedback on work is always constructive and useful. I love the range of work that we get to see both in terms of people’s stages as a photographer and the subject matter. Often we see work as an idea right through to the final outcome and that’s a fascinating process. I showed this project as I was doing it and the feedback encouraged me to continue with it. I think LIP gives photographers an opportunity to show and talk about their work which is often lacking when you’re not in a college environment. And that’s vital because we learn from each other and often we work on our own which can be isolating. We all need to share and get responses to our work otherwise why do we do it? I usually come home from those meetings inspired by what I’ve seen and that feeds into my work.

Marysia’s website

Showcase interview by Corin Ashleigh Brown

Showcase interview by Corin Brown

Valentina Lari is an Italian born artist who works with mixed media, using film and still photography she explores the ideas of loss, death and childhood. Some of her work is born from a collaboration with musicians and authors. Her latest photographic project Reveries captures dreamlike landscapes and musings. The use of shadow creates strong moody compositions that seem to capture the moment just after a person has left the frame. Along with the photographer we the viewers become voyeurs of these empty scenes that seem to radiate with presence of some unseen being. The stillness of the space gives us the sense that the photograph has captured a fragment in time that we can enjoy lingering over.

LIP: What was your inspiration for the project Reveries and do you feel this could be a lifelong project or one with a definite end in sight?

Valentina: Yes I can see Reveries being a lifelong project. It was born from my own personal need to portray everyday life situations and locations as part of a dream sequence. I don’t spend days looking for the next possible shot. Somehow every time I am out with my camera I seem to be lucky enough to catch something that for me is magical – even a creature like a toad or a bird under a particular light or in certain circumstances can be part of this of dreamlike stream of consciousness. I love rooms that have been just emptied or objects that are strictly related to the body and our senses – mirrors, furniture and clothes, they just stand alone as if waiting to being used or moved to a different position. I love empty chairs for example – somehow they seem to represent the essence of a human body. Outdoors can be also extremely haunting and intimate, as if we are actually spectators of someone else’s dream and space: abandoned houses, empty lakes, swimming pools and deserted wastelands.

LIP: What is the central theme to this project?

Valentina: Ghost and dreams. And the memory they leave behind.

LIP: Your use of shadow as a strong compositional tool creates a sense of heightened atmosphere – do you think your technique would be as effective or translate as well if you shot digitally?

Valentina: My relationship with digital is terrible. I have taken shots with a digital camera in the past and enjoyed it. It’s fun but that’s all it is for me. It is like having a toy in my hands that makes a silly tune every time I press the button. No matter how sophisticated a digital camera is, I feel there is something lacking. I love every single sound that my old analogue camera makes.

With digital you find yourself checking every image and deleting ones you feel haven’t turned out right – I find this tedious and boring, as it somehow destroys the magic of capturing what it is in front of the lenses and the light that can change in a moment. When shooting film there is a feeling that the image may not come out exactly as you imagined, in fact it may not come out at all, but therein lies the challenge, the beauty of dealing with the unknown.

Generally, I don’t like working on commercial projects, but it is here where I think digital has so much value. Its affordability and instant access to the image, allows the commercial photographer to perfect the elements of the picture. Despite this I don’t feel my images would benefit from being shot digitally. This could be because I am not interested in the digital format or exploring its maximum potential. I love printing in the darkroom and my manipulation is controlled with hand movements and the opening and closing of the enlarger lens. The light is real and tangible – not virtual. Photoshop is an amazing and useful software but it simply doesn’t satisfy my creative pulse when working on my personal projects.

LIP: What or whom would you say has had the greatest influence on how you convey your ideas and approach to photography?

Valentina: My father is an amazing comic artist and illustrator and he has always been interested in images, from figurative art and cinema to photography. He gave me his old enlarger and taught me the basics of using it. He found photography an interesting medium but eventually he returned to painting and drawing. His approach to arts is traditional and in a way “old fashion” in the sense that he comes from a generation where to be an artist you had to be skilled. You had to be able to paint to be a painter, be able to know the light and the language to be a filmmaker and so on. I have the same approach; I still get frustrated when I see artists who are just businessmen/women and don’t have anything to say or truly comment on with their art. I have been brought up with the notion that art is honesty and expression of who you are and of what you want to say, even if no one wants to listen to it. I believe in hard work and real skills.

In terms of personal inspiration I have to admit that I am pretty ignorant regarding photographers. I never studied art or photography, I am self-taught and sometimes I find myself checking famous names in the field that I’ve never heard of! But over the past 15 years these are some of the photographers I have grown to admire: Sally Mann, Joel-Peter Witkin, Diane Arbus, Toni Frissell, Francesca Woodman, Giorgia Fiorio, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ian Saudek, are among those I feel a strong connection with. A couple of days ago I discovered that Mario Giacomelli also had a series of photos inspired by Cesare Pavese’s poem Verra’ la Morte e avra’ I tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes). The topic I chose for my series is different but I was quite shocked! I have taken some photos of my dying grandmother that remind of this study of a hospice during the sixties. It truly moved me.

LIP: You have collaborated with musicians and authors on other projects – how important are these other forms of art in influencing and evolving your work?

Valentina: I am restless. I‘ve struggled most of my life searching for the right artistic language to express what screams inside me. There is always a pain, and a joy to talk about. The difficulty is to find the right and honest way for you to express it. I started as an illustrator and I really wanted that to become my job and art but I felt I wasn’t good enough for my own standards. It was painful to try to translate the images from my head onto paper. It still is. I recently went back to illustration and I have been lucky, with some people liking my work and subsequently I have managed to put together some exhibitions that have resulted in some of my material being published here and there. The Kiss Hoarder for example, was collaboration with a novelist, Lana Citron who wrote a piece that was very suitable for the kind of dark, moody style that I use. And yes, I constantly work with musicians, I love taking photos of them, I think it’s incredibly beautiful to catch a blinking eye, a jump or a smile during a performance. Music is the supreme art anyway!

I am mainly a filmmaker; I studied film almost all my life. I came to London to make films. I have done some short films and currently still working on scripts. But I have moved away from this for various reasons and I now work on a more experimental and insular level. To finance a feature film is very hard in an industry that has become so profit driven. There is a small circle of very talented independent directors that are still working, but it’ s getting harder and they are the last generation that consider the medium of cinema as art and see the potential of a story not just from an economical point of view.

I am ever so grateful to many writers, film directors, musicians and painters. Their work changed my perspective on life and death. Gifted human beings that are not afraid of being controversial, explorative without being exploitative or pointlessly arrogant. People who come to mind: Luis Bunuel, Maya Deren, Ingmar Bergman, Truman Capote, Glynne Cicada, Andrei Tarkovsky, Egon Schiele, Gottfried Helnwein, Francis Bacon, The Quay Brothers, Antonin Artaud, Diamanda Galas, Cesare Pavese. These people are not merely driven to make profits but rather they see the value that a story can bring to the lives of the people who watch it unfold on film.

LIP: Do you think your birthplace has influenced your photography and if so how?

Valentina: You can’t sever your roots and my country has deeply influenced my photography. The shapes of landscape, the buildings, and the light are so different in Italy and your eye, no matter where you are, seeks what it used to. I come from Florence and we had some of the most poetic artists I’ve ever come across. Botticelli for instance – his composition and light are so delicate, the balance between all the elements is so fragile you feel it could break by just looking at it. So unconsciously, I think you end up recreating a certain mood or looking for a certain light regardless of the circumstances or the subject. Although I don’t feel in tune with general attitude towards life and arts that I find in Italy nowadays, I do miss the beauty of our towns and landscapes. But moreover I miss a deep raw dark side of my country that is unknown to most people. There is a pulsing vein that runs across the countryside and the seaside and it carries a tradition of dialects, superstitions, lullabies, passion, monsters and rituals that have shaped my childhood and any artistic urge I have. It’s a maladie and I feel this can be found in my Reveries project.

LIP: Do you ever shoot colour and what is your B&W film of choice?

Valentina: I use different films as I like to experiment, but I do find the Fujiifilm Neopan 400 very versatile and reliable. Very nice fine grain too. I do shoot in colour, but not very often. It doesn’t seem to translate my feelings and the sense of melancholy that I want to create. I want to freeze time in my images and I think colour photography sometime gives too much information. Despite this I am actually starting a project in colour, inspired by medicine, witchcraft and painting. But I continue to take some black and white shots at the same time just to be on the safe side!

LIP: What are your future plans – exhibitions? New projects?

Valentina: I am currently working on a visual project in collaboration with the Mutter Museum, a famous pathological collection in Philadelphia. It’s an experimental film as well as a series of photos for a future exhibition there, and possibly in London. I am also very interested in art and medicine as I feel that combining the two provides a perfect opportunity to push some boundaries. I am always happy to work on new photographic exhibitions and projects, it make me feel that all the images that I accumulate year after year make sense of life to me and possibly to my audience.

Valentina’s website

Showcase interview by Corin Brown

Originally from Vienna, Austria, Krystina moved via Paris to London in the 70s and has lived in London ever since. After completing a sociology degree in the School of African and Asian Studies at the University of Sussex in the mid-70s she had a long career in the voluntary sector. In the early 90s, she studied Fine Art and Photography at Camberwell School of Art in South London, and returned to work in an urban regeneration project before taking early retirement in 2006. Since then she has pursued her passion in photography, shooting in both colour and black and white. Her self-published book Urban Parallels (2008) is available on Blurb.

For this interview we discussed Krystina’s series entitled In Between.

She says, “A quote from Gary Winogrand has lodged itself indelibly in my consciousness: “There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described”. It is this seemingly contradictory combination of mystery and fact that keeps me searching from the corners of my eyes zooming in and out on physical forms and the spaces between them.”

Though her photographs may appear as documents of urban fragments, Krystina says they are not really ‘about’ those specific things. “It doesn’t much matter to me which particular objects or features I am depicting. I am far more interested in the relationships they have to each other across the spaces in between and how light, surfaces and forms intersect with my own psyche and cultural baggage.”

“I enjoy working with complex layers, incongruous or contradictory juxtapositions and constant changes in appearances. When making an image, I try to discover an underlying geometry within the picture plane and to reveal some harmonising unity or wholeness. Hopefully it is a unity that allows the diverse spatial and formal elements to breathe freely within and to communicate to us something of their own unique life.”

LIP: It seems as though you have endless opportunity to create images out of the subject matter you’ve chosen.

KRYSTINA: Yes, but no more than if the subject were ‘fences’ or ‘boundaries’. Ambiguity in perception and interpretation fascinates me and I expect it will do so for some time to come.

My approach to shooting is that of a gatherer rather than a hunter, in many ways akin to the way photographers of the past tended to work, photographers such as Dorothea Lange. Although working to document social conditions, she preferred not to plan what she would shoot:

“To know ahead of time what you are looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting.”

I used that quote in the introduction of my book Urban Parallels, it has become my mantra. Having said that, I do like to work to projects, mainly because it helps me decide where to roam, but I’m always expecting serendipitous and chance encounters to happen. Whether the resulting images fit into any of my ‘boxes’ is left to a much later stage.

LIP: What do you consider your ideal shooting conditions?

KRYSTINA: As any photographer knows, the quality of light determines the kind of image you will get. Late afternoon light and long shadows are always seductive, but because I am after capturing different moods I do also like to shoot under less ideal conditions, even in the rain, if it suits that particular subject.

Sites and places that are fairly empty of people and uncluttered by cars are ideal for me, unless the car surfaces themselves are the focus of my attention as has recently been the case.

LIP: So what sort of locations attract you most? You must spend a lot of time wandering and looking for details.

KRYSTINA: Indeed I do. The type of photography I do doesn’t really depend on specific locations. The photographs may happen anywhere – it is the presence of man-made materials and structures, such as glass, metal, walls, and signs of use and abuse that is important to me. Hence locations in transition have proven to be particularly fertile gathering grounds – work sites such as places undergoing refurbishment, industrial parks, building sites and small workshops which are often found hidden away in back alleys. Here the new rubs up against the old, structures and materials have a history, they bear the traces of human activity, of time, weather or erosion and organic matter. All of this results in rich visual layers and complexities that act like magnets to my eyes.

LIP: I know you are experimenting with a return to using film, but what has your experience been like shooting digitally?

KRYSTINA: After acquiring my first digital camera over three years ago, after having been starved of any creative outlet for over a decade I went a bit wild, shooting well over 100 images a day at least five days a week. At some point though, I stopped. The world was flooded with images, why add to the flood? Looking back over my work I tried to analyse and make sense of what I had produced; which images stood out from the rest. As part of this process, I found it useful to put together a book using a self-publishing platform.

My current photographic output is by comparison considerably reduced. I still shoot a fair amount of images I subsequently judge to be mediocre, but fewer of those, I believe. Part of the attraction of trying out medium format film is that it will slow me down even further. I like the idea of having to be more deliberate and to sweat a little before achieving results.

LIP: On the editing of your work – What qualities do you think make great photographs rise above the mediocre ones?

KRYSTINA: The image should communicate something beyond the actual objects depicted within it, something ‘other’. What that ‘other’ is precisely, I do not know, except perhaps that it has something to do with how I, or my subconscious, responds to the body language of the materials and spaces involved. Ultimately, It is the degree to which that body language touches me and stirs my senses and imagination that becomes the deciding factor, although even this may change on repeated viewing. The image needs to be memorable and stand the test of time. Of course, it may not be so to anyone else. I have to take that risk.

LIP: What do you think there is to gain by making a book of your work?

KRYSTINA: The development of affordable on-line publishing offers great opportunities for putting together cohesive selections of one’s work in print. One can hold a book in the hand again and again, carry it around and share it with others – not only with people one meets, but with anyone in the world interested enough to view or buy it.

The book helped me evaluate my output of the past two years. It was interesting to see to what extent different subject matter and forms could relate across the double pages and through the sequencing and to find new associations and connections emerge. It was an altogether useful exercise and one that I enjoyed.

LIP: Do you feel these images communicate something about your personality?

KRYSTINA: All photographs tell us something about the person behind the lens. Each photograph, even a snapshot, has been wilfully created by someone making a conscious or subconscious selection.

Photojournalists and documentary photographers try to chase the ‘real’ by narrowing their focus on actions that can be seen. Or, they select frames that they judge will tell a story they feel needs to be told. Images are intended to function as a wider window on a particular group of individuals, a community or location. That leaves out a lot of reality even without considering other dimensions such as smell, sound and touch.

Artists on the other hand often subvert, manipulate or stage photographs using them deliberately for the purpose of expressing themselves or particular concepts and ideas they may have.

For my part, reality as I find it and the metamorphosis the photographic process enables me to achieve seems engrossing and rewarding enough. I am more than content to work on the fringes and in between these two fields – neither simply documenting nor unduly manipulating – a vast area that gets rather scant coverage and attention.

LIP: What photographers’ work have you been admiring, or inspired by lately?

KRYSTINA: I am curious enough to see a wide range of contemporary photography in galleries, books and online. Many works may stimulate my mind, but rarely do they touch all my senses, for that I usually turn back to favourite master photographers, such as Aaron Siskind, Minor White, Josef Koudelka, Raymond Moore. I particularly feel drawn to that unique and single-minded vision of Mario Giacomelli who did everything to his negatives one wasn’t supposed to do. I have a book of his black and white aerial photographs that I always keep by my bedside. It contains stunning abstractions of man’s imprint on the landscape. Some of the colour works of Richard Misrach derive from a similar preoccupation, but with far more ethereal and delicate results. I find his works rather beautiful, despite or rather because of their more serious undercurrents.

Inevitably, given a degree of shared concerns, Sabine Hornig and Uta Barth’s works continue to be of great interest to me. I am also rather impressed by the way they display their works within the gallery space, and in Hornig’s case how she extends her photographs into installation pieces. Although installation work is my background, I do not feel the urge to emulate her, at least not so far.

Krystina’s website

Interview by Tiffany Jones

Nicholas Cobb’s photography captures the humorous and humdrum events of our everyday lives as city dwellers. Many of his images are made first by creating elaborate set models populated with figurines, then photographing his own manipulated narratives. For some of his series he has bent and moulded plastic bottles, card and general waste, but whatever material he uses, the outcome is a collection of scenes that we can all relate to.

Coming from a background of art school and twenty years of abstract painting, Nicholas abandoned the canvas and picked up a camera to capture the life he imbues in his models. This abrupt change in artistic approach came about seven years ago as he began exploring all that was opposite to what he had done in the past. His interests in sculpture, model-making, the narrative and photography all came together in previous projects such as Ovid’s Metamorphosis, and Life of Christ.

In November 2003 Nicholas bought a simple digital compact camera that allowed him control over aperture and shutter speed, and over the next few months concentrated on honing his photographic knowledge whilst documenting a local allotment over many dawns and dusks. He now teaches photography to beginners part time and is continuing with new projects.

For this showcase we take a look at images from his series The Office Park as well as some from previous projects that show the breadth of his imagination for scene and structure through model creation.

LIP: The Office Park is much darker than your earlier work and is open to far more interpretations. Would you agree to this statement and what are you hoping to communicate to the viewer with this project?

NICHOLAS: Yes, I was after something a little more unsettling. Various ideas came together and by the end of the summer in 2008 I started making an elaborate model of a business park. That summer I had read several of J.G. Ballard’s novels including ‘Super Cannes’, which is about disturbing behaviour amongst the inhabitants of a gated community isolated from the world. Whilst walking along the arterial routes out of west London I had ‘discovered’ a nearly completed office park development. The idyllic setting combined with the ever-present ‘security’ got under my skin and left me wondering about a dystopian outcome for this kind of world.

I was aware of the problems photographers have trying to photograph in certain locations. Parts of our cities are sold off to developers who create work, living, shopping and recreation facilities that appear public but are in fact private, with all sorts of rules enforced by security guards. Does one feel safer in these environments or more likely to be paranoid about how dangerous it is outside of their ‘protected’ boundaries?

So the series has at its centre a dark artificial lake which appears to have the opposite effect on some of those that gaze into it than that intended by the landscape artist. Some employees come and go happily enough in the resulting images but others seem to be engaged in extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature.

LIP: Previously you have worked with junk based characters and backdrops, but for The Office Park you’ve used ready-made human models, created a sophisticated set, made great use of differential focus and there is a complete change of colour palette. What was the inspiration for this change in approach?

NICHOLAS: I don’t work to commission or worry about funding for projects. I get by teaching. This means that I can go where I want with ideas. So I set myself the challenge of making architectural models out of the materials that such model-makers use, including readymade trees and figures. I knew that I could help make the images appear believable by using a shallow depth of field, generally throwing much of the buildings out of focus. Even the main subject could be out of focus as many of these photographs were meant to have the edgy look of surveillance about them. I wanted to explore how very realistic looking images worked on the viewer. The photographs are virtually black and white, evoking ideas like the past, memory, the things in one’s head.

LIP: You seem to have used image manipulation and layering to great effect in this work. How important is image manipulation in your work?

NICHOLAS: The digital darkroom, like the digital camera, made it possible for me to see that I could make work photographically. All this could be done without digital though. I try to get it right in the camera! So, I use Photoshop sparingly, simple double exposures, for instance. The prints are not quite black and white, I was after a tint, a draining of colour, that Photoshop makes easy to apply.

LIP: Making models and photographing them seems to be your medium of choice. What inspired you to see characters in recyclable plastic drink containers and other waste? Is recycling an important part of your work?

NICHOLAS: One thing in particular that caught my eye on the allotment was the use of drink containers as ‘scarecrows’. They were beautiful translucent objects to photograph.

Later, when I wanted to make an image of the Virgin Mary, I realized that all I had to do was slit the throat, as it were, of a blue capped, two pint milk bottle, tilt that ‘head’ back, set it in a window and photograph it.

As far as recycling is concerned my curiosity led me to research obscure texts such as Michael Thompson’s ‘Theory of Rubbish’. So, although I’m a dutiful recycler, that’s not the message. I’m drawn to the way that a creative intervention can take place along the route of commodities to trash – for instance, Picasso made a bull’s head sculpture out of a bicycle seat and handlebars.

LIP: So, is the photograph itself the actual artwork or is it merely a documentation of your models?

NICHOLAS: From the start I wanted the final work to be not only photography but a book of photographs with a narrative implied.

LIP: How long does it take you to make your models and photograph them?

NICHOLAS: The figures were purposely made from material that I could quickly shape into believable poses. The backdrops vary considerably. Some sets are of a single shop front and take a day or two to make. Others are long sections of a street or business park and take a month or more to make. These can cover an area eight feet square providing many viewpoints. Like a tableau vivant, ‘figures’ are carefully arranged, lit, photographed, rearranged, swapped and photographed again until it works.

LIP: Did you use street photography as a starting point for the ‘Walking Down Rye Lane’ series?

NICHOLAS: Yes, I was certainly discovering all the great names of the genre as I developed that work. But I was also looking at the work of Jeff Wall, Gregory Crewdson, Thomas Demand and others. If you mean do I take street photographs and recreate them in model form then the answer is very rarely. On occasion I have thought it could work if I created a scene based on a particular photograph, my own or another, or painting. That’s more like a starting point and the end result can look quite different. I’ve lived near Rye Lane for over twenty years. Having made many of the images I did finally go down the street taking pictures and was very pleased with the result. But the whole secrecy, permission and intrusion issue on inner city streets left me feeling that I had found a novel approach to the genre by ‘staging’ it with models and I should stick to that.

LIP: Would you say that studying street photography helps you to create such engaging moments, injects such a sense of life, humour and activity into the world of the models you create and photograph?

NICHOLAS: Although it’s true that I’m mimicking street photography, and humour is invoked, I’m also paying homage to it. Along with urban landscapes it’s what I want to do when out of the studio. The ‘In-Public’ street photography website has many examples of humour found in everyday juxtapositions but I wanted to find it in the very material of the models. The viewer is engaged in a constant toing and froing between recognizing an all too familiar human gesture and the fact that it’s made from an all to familiar bit of junk.

I use all the ‘errors’ that can occur in real life – who’s in focus and who’s walking in or out of the frame? For some shots I would create a shoot from the hip look, others are more in your face. It’s generally a case of creating in the moment, fixing a gesture as one sculpted figure interacts with another – a greeting for instance – and you react to what’s in front of you. Over the years I’ve built up a store of memorable scenes that I’ve witnessed and I used them. It’s a soup of memories, media images and imagination.

LIP: What do you do with the models once you’ve captured what you need in a group of photographs?

NICHOLAS: The models get broken up, thrown away or useful bits saved. I’ve nowhere to store them even if I wanted to.

When I embarked on the ‘Walking Down Rye Lane’ series I wanted as much of the model making as possible to be made out of discarded material. There’s an ongoing tension with the materials: paper and digital reference images, detritus ‘rescued’, sculpted, ‘documented’ digitally, sculpture destroyed and returned to trash status – the irony of sculpture’s expectation of permanence – and finally, the paper print. The photograph, the frozen moment, a moment that has passed… the relationship with time, all these things are of great interest to me.

LIP: You’ve recently had two exhibitions of your Rye Lane work. Any plans for a show of your Office Park work in the pipeline?

NICHOLAS: I plan to have some of them featured in a proposed group show at the Viewfinder gallery in Greenwich next summer.

The Office Park book is available at blurb as well as a number of other books.

Nicholas’s website

Interview by Corin Ashleigh Brown

John Levett is the leader of the Greenwich Satellite Group of London Independent Photography, since it’s founding two and a half years ago.

He explains his background: “Receiver of unwanted goods from ex-RAF aerial reconnaisance photographer at age ten. Various darkroom experiences in reconstructed outside lavvy and inside kitchen scullery followed, as did pocket money from snapping graves for families of deceased neighbours. Forty years later resurfaced in inspirational Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, joined transcendent LIP, found a life beyond shopping in Asda.”

For this showcase we discuss his collection of images called “Intent”, which did not begin as a series but emerged after various events. John says, “The taking of each of the photographs in the collection was accompanied either by a public monologue (occasionally threatening) or dialogue (sometimes demanding) regarding, variously, my motives for taking the shot, who I represented, the limits of privacy, matters of decency, questions of legality. These experiences raised issues of personal vs public space, the increasing restrictions upon our behaviour in the civil arena and how I conduct myself when photographing within identifiable communities.”

LIP: We are looking at quite a disparate series of images here where the common thread is your experience of being questioned or otherwise approached as to your intent as the photographer. What are your reasons for showing these images as a collection?

JOHN: In September 2008 I was walking along Sydney Street in Cambridge and decided to take a shot of a fading CND graffito. I’m interested in traces of social and economic history; I’d ignored it for too long. I took ten shots, stepped away, PC Dixon flashed his badge and politely asked why I was photographing the wall sign. I asked why he needed to flash the badge in order to find out. A semi-legal discussion with outrageously exaggerated claims on both sides took up ten minutes.

The incident made prominent issues of increasing incursions into civil space, restricting and manipulating how we negotiate place and space without interference from government and its agents. It is easy to counter by indicating that Cambridge city centre is not Tiananmen Square but principles of civil liberty are indivisible; every State prefers quiescence especially in public places. It’s not an exclusive issue for photographers; it is an issue for football supporters, party goers, picnickers, skateboarders, free-runners, train spotters, climate campers, anti-capitalists.

Most importantly it’s an issue of politics and how we engage in securing our own spaces. The terrorist-security trope is the catch-all for all manner of incursions and, understandably, it’s easier to comply than confront. It’s easy to adopt a metaphorical sliding-scale of liberty; if it’s a toss-up between arguing taking of a photograph and missing the last train out of town then the train wins.

There’s also another aspect to this collection which relates to our own protection of our privacy aside from official and extra-official policing of it. I’m referring not to the casual interest in why I’m photographing what I’m photographing but to its scaling-up to interrogation, demand and threat. I’m guessing that if I set up with easel & paint in a high street then I’d get a certain indulgence; tripod and the bellows on Richmond Hill above the Thames would tick the right boxes; a walk ’n snap past Petts Wood mock-Tudor gets you serious attention; the same thing under the Westway near White City can bring gatherings. “You might own the house but you don’t own the view” doesn’t match up to “If I still see you here in five minutes time I’ll smash that [] camera over your [] head”.

This aspect of the ‘photographic walk’ raises different questions. One is the extent to which the photographer is both an intruder and is seen to be an intruder—one who comes into a community and seeks to record an aspect of it but without any reference to or negotiation with those who occupy that space.

The other is a perceived change regarding the responsibility for protecting community spaces from the community to the individual. Jane Jacobs in ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ showed how safety in urban areas was protected not only by their physical configuration but by the way the residents moved around their areas and promoted a communal awareness and acted upon it. This is still true of some neighbourhoods in the city but with redevelopment of traditional street patterns, the formalising of play and recreational areas and the confusion of private and public thoroughfares the lone photographer is assessed as a risk and there lies a communal responsibility to confront the scoundrel.

LIP: How do you justify taking such photographs?

JOHN: In two ways—to myself and to another.

Most of what I photograph has some connection with memory—most strongly my own memories of growing and becoming, importantly my memories of the environs in which I lived, intellectually the memory etched on the face of a city. Creating a photograph of my personal memories involves only those who see the finished work; photographing my memories of an imagined city and the city’s reflection back involves others in the making and it’s this that can promote feelings of intrusion and being intruded upon.

If I can say of a place, “I used to live here” or “My mum used to run a grocer’s shop just round the corner” or “There used to be a bandstand there” then I make a connection to a past that is in possession of everybody. Others can relate to my memories.

History as remembrance matters. A people without history is vulnerable: “This is how we used to be” can be a source of purely romantic sentiment or it can be one of inspiration.

Photography not only records but it makes sense of things—how space is changed and changes in its turn; how communities grow, how they decline; how we built for permanence, how we build for immediacy. An entrance to a disused sorting office sets in stone the belief that post men will forever deliver the post; a shop is abandoned in step with the abandonment of its tape cassettes; trespassers were indeed once prosecuted for walking through Hawes Lane allotments. “All that is solid melts into air” wrote Marx correctly of modernity whilst then going on to unfortunately prophesy the end of history. Sir Kenneth Clark once said that civilisation began when people could envision a future; history is a remembrance of that people’s aspiration and endeavour, it roots us. It roots me.

When questioned I often never get past “This is where we lived just after the last war”. That’s usually good enough. If asked “Which war was that then?” I get started.

LIP: Do you appreciate when people are curious about what you are up to?

JOHN: When I returned to photography in the mid-90s I flapped around finding what engaged me most; it was architecture—modernism & it’s successors. I learnt all the angles, found the spots, finessed the crop, heroically pursued the heroic. If anybody took notice I didn’t notice it. For about ten years I walked through university campuses, shopping centres, office complexes, housing estates, new towns, old car parks—no questions, no confrontation, no badge-flashing.

Then things changed. What we can do in public spaces changed; questions came to be asked, positions taken, poses struck. Security was everyone’s affair, everyone a threat, the wandering stranger especially so. No more gaily snapping without consequence.

The strident questioner is more a player in what I do now than at the beginning of the decade but, more generally, those who are curious are simply more protective of self, kin and community—one way of making sense of disruption. Am I from the council? Am I going to do anything about the rubbish tipping? Are those houses coming down? Am I snooping for a solicitor? Do I know that this place is sacred? Had I thought of contributing to the wreath? Am I aware that this is a flood-plain and any more building on this’ll cause flooding in those streets?

I welcome the curious. I get stopped. I want to know what they know of the history of this place. Everybody knows part of the history of this place. Educational reform has tried for decades to kill off history (“It’s so ‘yesterday’ my dear”). The idea of the narrative, of placing oneself in history, of using it to make sense and shape of how we are now—these things matter to me, anchor me in a spot from where I get bearings, allow me to see that there are alternative ways of shaping a world. I’m not alone.

LIP: There are plenty of ‘T’s and text among these pictures, have you noticed this?

JOHN: Public text is a prime indicator of social and historical change. Punctuation, phrasing, typeface, position of use, its permanence or impermanence—all can place a neighbourhood in a particular moment, express assumptions of common interest, show confidence in a society and indicate a state of ‘here today, gone tomorrow’.

The ‘T’s are coincidental but the crosses aren’t. As a child and well into my teens I went to church and chapel a lot and by ‘a lot’ I mean that it became the foundation of my life—three times a day on Sundays, prayer meetings, bible study, out on the streets proselytising. The chapel became the only place when I felt unconditionally accepted. I changed and my belief changed but there is part of that experience that is permanently with me. Recognizing a Christian symbol out of context in the street still brings something back. It’s an acknowledgment of somewhere I passed through; it never goes away.

LIP: You mentioned creating a narrative – of placing oneself in history and alternative ways of shaping a world. Do you see your work contributing to a collective narrative, the history of ‘us’ as you see it, or is your photographic approach primarily driven by your individual stories?

JOHN: I’m not alone in attributing a narrative to my life and thereby making sense of ‘The Whole Thing’. I also used to believe in the power of the collective narrative, the ‘purpose’ of history as a centripetal tendency that might contribute to and bring forth a collective shift in consciousness regarding how we organized our world. The history of the last century should have destroyed any belief in history as containing elements of purpose and inevitability.

The idea and creation of a people’s history is, however, a practical project and is a central feature of the work of a multitude of photographers. In some cases it’s centred in museums, galleries and libraries, in others in local history societies, elsewhere in trade unions and what’s left of working people’s clubs. Alongside written accounts, taped interviews, folk song, island languages and restored film the photographic record is crucial. It exists in an album, in a bottom drawer, in a semi-detached house, in a suburb of any town. It tells me how something of once was when I was born. It tells me about my relation to other cultures, other sexes, other classes; it tells me more than we ever admitted or wanted to know about family relations; it tells me about school, workshop, factory, holidays sacred and profane, urbanisation, de-industrialisation.

The history of Us is intimately connected to our individual stories but like all ‘histories’ they can sink with only faint traces. One of my cousins used to be the family archivist. Photographs from the end of the nineteenth century gathered in her albums. Once she died there was no one committed enough to continue the collection. The family, once concentrated in a few south London boroughs gradually dispersed during the last century and the close connections of one branch with another gradually frayed. What was once ‘The Family’ is no longer, what was once ‘The Archive’ is now many archives but they’re just as meaningful, they still have the function of connecting.

LIP: With so many photographers these days documenting our time in vastly different ways, how will your images physically be seen 50 years from now when they may have more value in the world? I mean, how do our photographs live beyond us, who will show them around after we’re gone? Is this important to you?

JOHN: Personally, it is not important that anything of me or anything of mine survives, but as a representative amongst many who grew to maturity in the immediate post-war world I think that our collective documentation of our era is important. I believe that the nature of what we believed to be representative democracy is changing along with governments’ relationship with elites and non-accountable agencies in society and that this threatens an individual’s relationship with the political process. If political accountability declines then economic accountability is further stifled.

Mainstream, prime-time news outlets do not serve us well—Sky plays the piper’s tune, the BBC self-censors after the Hutton-David Kelly events while the paper press revolves around imperial and post-imperial concerns and frightening celeb saturation.

Meanwhile, there are many fine photographers in the Majority World who struggle for outlets—those who document the Somali war, oil extraction in the Niger Delta, conflict in the south Philippines, labour unrest in Egypt, the public execution of gays in Iran, the violence on civil rights campaigners in Russia, environmental activism in central Asia, immigrant workers in South Africa. Photography documents struggle; it also documents success—New Internationalist featured photographers from the Majority World back in August 2007; here’s the link: www.newint.org/issues/2007/08/01/

Showing how we got from there to here matters in the personal dimension because it provides continuity of family, of clan, of tribe, of sect—it grounds us. It matters in the community dimension because it provides evidence which, given the multiplicity of channels of communication, can bypass the state and its agents. In this time in which we live the means and agencies of repression are growing and agencies of coercion are being outsourced. Photography keeps the pot boiling; keeps scratching the itch. Go back to Don McCullin’s images of the Vietnam war. Amongst all the noise, the single image shouts loudest.

LIP: What effect has photography had on your psyche? And would you recommend it as a practice for personal development?

JOHN: For someone totally self-obsessed, my psyche gets a hard time from photography. Like everyone else there are things in my life that didn’t happen and I wish they had. There are things in my life that did happen and were severely troubling. I am, however, happy with the result.

I have spent much time privately and publicly documenting aspects of my life. I have done it specifically to try and understand parts of my life that seemed forever boarded-up—things never talked about, things lied about, things avoided, people missing, people without names. I’m trying to fill gaps and it’s impossible. What it does do, however, is tell me much about the coping mechanisms that I’ve created, the bluffs I’ve played, the ignorance I’ve tolerated, the self-deception I’ve practiced, the snake oil I’ve bought, the scumbag I once was.

It works. I’m now healed, totally spiffing, safe as a tightrope walker, as certain of the correctness of my self-belief as a futures trader.

Photography and personal development—better results than reading Proust.

Interview by Tiffany Jones

This Showcase is an extension of a piece published in the Autumn 2009 issue of London Independent Photography Magazine. The magazine features a series of ‘non-portraits’ that Ellie created for Format Festival 2009 with Latitude Photographers (a collective she is a part of) as a response to the line ‘I Always Knew You’d Come Back…’.

In this continued interview Ellie discusses her landscape work entitled Silent, Dark and Deep and gives us some insight into her development as a photographer and how she approaches her projects.

Ellie graduated in December 2008 with an MA Photography from London College of Communication, and already this year her work has been shown in five exhibitions including Beautiful Landscapes at 3 Bedfordbury Gallery and New Landscape at Kalman Crane Gallery in Brighton, which she co-curated.

LIP: How did you find the MA course at London College of Communication?

ELLIE: Really good. We had great guest lecturers and teachers and turors. I found it tough. I just wasn’t really used to the crit process of working – that’s something I found hard, exposing my work to people when it wasn’t finished, it wasn’t fully developed. You take an idea and you work on it for two years so it changes. As I was still working through it I often I felt I hadn’t decided what I thought about it before I had to then talk about it to other people, who were then giving me their opinions. It can really sway your judgement. Although In the end I could look back on it and feel it’s all been constructive and it pushed me to seriously consider what I was doing in a way I wouldn’t have done otherwise

LIP: Are you sensitive about your work then, or has that subsided somewhat after all that critique?

ELLIE: I think everybody has an emotional investment in their work, so I wouldn’t say I’m any more sensitive than anyone else who has put a lot of time into something. It’s enabled me to talk about my work, because before I hadn’t really put it into the structure of a body of work with a strong kind of conceptual underpinning.

LIP: So how much of your time do you spend actually creating conceptual statements?

ELLIE: I do quite a lot of reading and writing. I tend to write lots of notes and keep books of diagrams, and generally I’m thinking about a project at least six months before I start shooting. I always have my notebook on me and I’m writing down ideas so there’s quite a lot to draw on when I actually sit down to write a statement. I tend to tweak it later, and this is a technique I suppose I developed from doing my MA. We were writing our artist statements all the way through the course and every time the work changed and evolved you’d need to record your artist statement. I think it’s a good way of keeping a grip on what you’re doing.

LIP: It seems like you shoot most of your work at night, at least what you are showing on your website?

ELLIE: Actually all the tree landscape images are shot during the day using natural light. I always shoot in really bad weather. When you have a forest with light pouring into it, there are pools of light inside and the idea was to have a dark interior. When it’s gray and raining I run out to take pictures which is the different from what most people do.

LIP: What about your choice of format, I also thought these landscapes were panoramic?

ELLIE: No they’re not. I use a D300 with a wide angle lens and I put my camera on a tripod. For the trees I take a shot, move along a little bit and so on. I then work them together on the computer by hand. I suppose I could shoot with a panoramic camera but I really like that by building it with different images that lay on top of each other, each of them may be shot in a wonky way, it’s a slightly haphazard process and I end up with a landscape that’s different from how it looks in real life.

LIP: Your experience with the landscape then is a bit more intimate isn’t it?

ELLIE: It is, it feels more painterly because you’re building it and making it. They’re meant to be constructed reflections on traces of memories of woodland and forests. I like the pictures to look otherworldly and slightly magical because I want them to seem like imagined landscapes and I like to show them really big so that you can engage with them and feel that you’re being either drawn in or repelled.

LIP: Once you have constructed these images and take a step back to look at them yourself, do you get a sense of stepping into a narrative that was never your original intention?

ELLIE: It’s funny you say that because I went to Dartmoor with two friends and we were driving and they’re quite used to me having my equipment in the car and saying stop and jumping out and running down to the tree line to make photographs. I shoot quickly, so it might take less than an hour. My friend had been telling ghost stories about some scary things that had happened to him and he’s from Dartmoor. It was a really dark day and started to rain and we drove past this amazing forest. He was holding an umbrella for me in this creepy woodland. That night I woke up and thought ‘imagine if I start to retouch these pictures and there’s somebody in there’ and really freaked myself out. When I was retouching it, the image did take on this strange sort of presence, and I really like that about it. Because they are of the imagination I want to build something that has a kind of psychological presence. There’s a mythology with woodland, like the idea that you’re told to keep out as a child and what might happen, you know every culture has a mythology and fairytales about woodland.

LIP: So you shoot rather quickly?

ELLIE: Actually sometimes hours will flash by and I’ll think, my god I’ve been here for ages. But, the actual taking of the photographs is part of a long process. It’s deciding how I’m going to do it and then an awful lot of thought planning and testing and experimentation has gone into developing this way of working. Shooting it, I know how far away I’m going to be, where the tripod’s going to be. I know what exposure I’m going to be on, the shots I need to take, what area I’m going to cover. A lot of the decisions have been made already. And then following taking the photographs there’s a long process of retouching.

LIP: I find it interesting that you work with digital at a time when it seems fine art photographers are using medium or large format film. Is this just your preference, and do you think it prevents some people from appreciating your work in a serious way?

ELLIE: Essentially I am working with enormous files that when you see the work printed could very well have been shot with a Hassleblad digital camera. Some people feel that digital is still not acceptable quality, but for me it does everything that I want it to do and it actually enables me to work in a different way than with film. With film I’d be working very differently, I’d still be scanning everything.

I hadn’t really shot at night before using digital and I realised you get these amazing colours, I mean it’s just like magic! I didn’t know, and I remember taking my first ever digital night photograph, which was in the LIP Annual Exhibition last year, of a man standing next to a swimming pool looking at a woman approaching the surface. I was absolutely blown away by the colours. That’ll do it for me really, it was seductive. And with digital I find looking at the image in the back of the camera quite a constructive way of working because you see what’s happening and then you can play with it.

LIP: Looking at your portfolio I’m wondering, do you print your own images?

ELLIE: Yes. It seems like one of the fundamentals of photography, from its earliest stages, and although some people would say that digital is not a fine art medium I think that amount of control reflects fine art practice. I find it really important.

LIP: Are you working towards a solo show anytime soon?

ELLIE: Definitely. It’s a really expensive business to do a solo show and at the moment I’m really enjoying working towards group shows, so I feel that’s what I need to be doing right now. Maybe I’d like to do a solo show in a year or so. I’ve just co-curated New Landscapes with Wendy Pye who is also showing in the exhibition. Getting people excited about what we wanted to do and making it happen has been great, a really exciting process. I’d love to do more of that.

LIP: What are your aspirations now?

ELLIE: I would say at the moment I’ve come out of college and I want to keep on producing personal work, keep on trying to sell work and see where it takes me, see if I can sustain myself in that way. I feel very lucky at this point to be allowed to do what I want.

Ellie’s website

Interview by Tiffany Jones

At the age of 16 Mike left Edinburgh to visit London and was so taken by the city he hasn’t managed to move home yet. That was 16 years ago. Having been influenced at a young age by technical drawing he started a career in cartography, but his developing passion for visual communication evolved into taking his dad’s old camera to gigs and now a career as a photographer. Mike returned to university in his late 20’s to complete a BA Photography from University of East London with first class honours and has since been accumulating awards and extending the reach of his work internationally. In May 2009 he won best Fine Art Single Image at the New York Photo Festival. Last year he was a BJP Project Assistance Award nominee and his photographs have also been recognised in the 2008 AOP Assistant Awards (Merit winner, Interiors & Architecture category) and the 2007 AOP Red Dot competition, amongst others.

The images accompanying the following interview are from Mike’s project entitled Ad-Site. He says:

“The catalyst for my Ad-Site project was the increase in new construction works taking place in London. Walk past one of these building sites and you’ll be greeted with artists’ impressions of modern utopias, which promise an elevated social existence by living, working, or even just visiting one of these locations. But there’s a radical distinction between utopian vision and the social reality which attends the upheavals of regeneration – and which remains out of public view. I wanted to deconstruct these projections of pristine living and suggest towards the unseen on the social infrastructure that gentrification entails.”

LIP: You just won the award for best Fine Art Single Image at the New York Photo Festival. What does that recognition mean to you personally?

MIKE: It’s a massive sense of relief to be recognised on your personal work by such influential people in the industry. In some ways it feels like all the hard work is starting to pay off and obviously the exposure gained through the award has so far been fantastic, this all helps in raising the profile of your work.

LIP: Were you in New York for the awards?

MIKE: I wasn’t over there for it, I knew a few days before that I had been nominated and I was tempted to go but I’m not really into the whole awards ceremony thing. However I am really looking forward to going over next year where the work will be exhibited as part of the 2010 NYPH festival.

LIP: In your opinion what qualities make for an outstanding fine art image?

MIKE: For me a fine art photograph must contain a specific aesthetical presence, it needs to come from an idea that is considered and a concept that’s developed into a final image or a series of images that contain both a graphic form and elements of beauty.

LIP: Do you feel your background in cartography has affected your perspective and aesthetics as a photographer? How?

MIKE: Without a doubt, I spend quite a lot of time just observing what’s in front of me before taking a shot and that’s probably down to the surveying. When shooting landscapes I try to visualise how the contours on a map would look and how this can be captured in a photograph. I’m obsessed by geometric forms and I hope that’s prevalent in most of my work.

LIP: In your Ad-Site series, you photograph the contrast between an idealised picture of lifestyle and community and the reality that exists beyond that visually. What instincts attracted you to photograph these scenes? Is it mainly an aesthetic attraction for you, or do you have strong opinions about gentrification and the sociological impact of urban development?

MIKE: Initially it was purely aesthetical, I’d seen a few of these hoarding sites around town and started to be fascinated by the idea of developers using projected images of utopian living and through developing the project it became more of a social study for me.

LIP: What methods do you use to make such a project – from the time you have an idea through to planning and actually making the images – is there a routine you keep to?

MIKE: Most of my ideas tend to come out of just seeing things whilst I’m out and about, I normally do a quick test shoot to see if there’s something interesting there then spend a bit of time researching ideas and developing a concept. It’s during this stage that I start to really understand what it is that I’m trying to say with a photo project and then I’ll spend around 3 or 4 months on planning, out on reconnaissance (assessing the environment for things like permits, traffic, sun path, etcetera), shooting, editing and retouching. This has been the way my last few projects have gone and it seems to work well for me. I like to have a bit of time in the initial stages just considering the final intended outcome, there’s no point in spending all that time and money on a project that is mediocre.

LIP: What does that process involve for you, considering the final outcome?

MIKE: It depends on the scale of the project. If it’s a longer term project then I’d be looking into exhibiting the work so I’ll make contact with galleries and curators. If it’s a smaller project I’ll consider the type of editorial I want it to be published in. I also keep an eye on any major upcoming competitions as it’s a great way to get your work seen. I often find myself speeding up the complete process to meet deadlines.

LIP: What form do you think is the optimal way to display your final images – in exhibitions or books, or some other form?

MIKE: I think my work is best suited to the traditional white walls in galleries. I am putting together a book at the moment, it’s in the very early stages and the more I look into it the more I realise just how much work is involved, but it’s something I need to do.

LIP: What are the most valuable skills or lessons that you took away from doing your BA?

MIKE: The course was a bit of a mixed outcome in that it was the first of its kind at UEL. There wasn’t too much structured learning and facilities were lean, however we had some amazing teachers over the 3 years and the library was one of the best around so I spent a lot of my time just researching and developing my theory skills. I guess as a mature student I got exactly what I wanted out of the course. I also realised early on that once I had graduated I wouldn’t walk out and become a photographer overnight so I started assisting as early as I could to learn about the industry on a commercial level.

LIP: Aside from your personal work are you taking on commissions, and what is it like separating the two ways of working?

MIKE: I’m getting some interest from a few architectural clients and I’ve just finished a job for a hotel chain shooting a site in Beijing that will hopefully be extended to more hotels in other countries. There’s also a few part-commissioned projects that are being finalised now that I’m very excited about. I’m precious about my work regardless of whether its personal or commissioned, however I do enjoy the complete creative control I have when working on my own projects but I imagine it’s like that for most photographers.

LIP: Do you enjoy travelling with your camera?

MIKE: It really depends. I don’t travel around London with a camera in my bag but that’s because I don’t rely on the incidentals of photography. However if I’m going away from London then I’ll always have at least one camera with me. I’d rather run out of clothes to wear than not have enough film in my bag.

LIP: Have you noticed much change your style and approach the more projects that you complete?

MIKE: It’s becoming more developed with each new project. I’ve realised you need to keep pushing yourself and your technique otherwise your work becomes stagnant and laborious to produce. Working in the industry you get exposed to several styles and its one of the most difficult things to find is your own unique style that you are actually happy with and that isn’t heavily influenced by the people around you. One of the best compliments I’ve ever received was when somebody told me they had seen my work in a magazine and knew it was mine just by the style.

LIP: What’s the ‘Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed’ group exhibition at PG that you’re involved in this month (June 2009)?

MIKE: It’s a competition that the Photographers Gallery run for recent graduates to showcase their work. I was lucky enough to be selected as a finalist.

Mike’s website

Interview by Tiffany Jones

David Brownridge was born in Scotland in 1957 and studied photography in Glasgow before moving to London in 1978. He currently works as a freelance picture researcher mainly in the areas of current affairs, art and science. With 25 years of experience he’s worked for many newspapers, magazines and publishers and regularly with The Economist and Nature magazines.

David’s personal photography is now primarily done in the streets of London, but his interests have been varied, including an earlier black & white project entitled “Familiar Cows“. Prints from that series are in the collections of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Scottish National Galleries in Edinburgh.

Here David discusses his extensive ongoing project “Walk on By“.

LIP: Could you explain where you like to photograph for this series and what draws you to shoot in the street?

DAVID: Well what draws me to shoot in the street is obviously people and the London streets are teeming with the whole world. The sheer mass of people and pace of movement makes this type of photography relatively easy. I think it would be much more difficult to do this in a provincial town or even in the outer London areas. I did a little bit of work in Barking and that was difficult. Even Camden town is different from the West End. Oxford Street is irresistible but I try to move around the smaller streets of Soho, Mayfair and sometimes the City. Narrower streets create light problems. I like Regent street for its wide open light.

LIP: Do you feel this is a confrontational method, photographing strangers at such close range?

DAVID: I don’t think it’s too confrontational. I never stop for a picture. I just snap and keep moving. I’m gone before people realise – mostly. But I can’t deny a certain degree of intrusion and the possibility of confrontation.

LIP: In some of your other work, in particular your “Things” series on your website, you seem to spend time meditating on aspects of composition. What happens when you photograph moving people, which certainly requires a very different approach? How do you make adjustments to photograph in these circumstances?

DAVID: That makes this work a real mental challenge. I still hesitate too often. I’m trying to practice just letting go of all inhibition and “be there” and get the picture (or a picture). Concentration and mental focus is very important and very difficult. Ideally I’d be totally “there” with a strong picture filling the whole frame but given the speed of movement it very rarely happens like that.

LIP: As you move so quickly, how does the composition form? Is a stronger composition in this case something you recognise only later or can you prepare for it?

DAVID: There is never time for composition or even focusing. I prefocus and judge distance then just point, shoot and hope for the best. It’s totally the opposite of what I’ve been used to doing with careful composition. Getting an interesting picture is so much a matter of chance. I think that’s what makes it exciting for me to do. There is a huge wastage rate. I delete about 90% immediately. Composition is done on the computer afterward. I eliminate the extraneous detail around the edges of the frame but it’s always a difficult decision. It’s tempting sometimes to crop too much but that often leads to a picture that’s just too neat.

I’ve learned to give the image a bit of space. A sense of context and atmosphere is very important even if means the edge of the frame is a bit messy. I’m getting to like the mess. Come to think of it it’s often not just the edges that are messy but the middle of the frame too where there is just so much going on it can look a bit confusing. I’m trying to allow the mess to just be there. After all that is what the real experience is. If the street is messy and noisy why should the pictures be anything else?

LIP: Regarding the messy and noisy circumstances – your “Things” pictures often show elements of interference as well. Do you want your pictures to show the chaos or do you think your successful images show peaceful moments within those scenes?

DAVID: Ultimately there is no such thing as chaos and peaceful. Hopefully the image will suggest to the viewer a way of seeing which dispenses with those concepts and judgements. We can enjoy the visual world more if we don’t fall into these traps. There is a freedom to be gained here and that’s more important than peace.

As much as we like to make it so the world isn’t ordered for the convenience of our sensibilities and value judgements. This is as true of the visual world as any other aspect of life. It’s important for me as a photographer to try to accept what’s there and leave it alone. How to do this and, at the same time, make an image which has some weight and power is the biggest challenge. I could say it is THE challenge for me as a photographer. It’s also, of course, a challenge for the viewer. I hate the kind of criticism that says it would be better if that detail wasn’t there or if you were a bit more to the left or a bit this or a bit that. It is what it is. It either touches you or it doesn’t. My instinct is to include as much as possible. I think we get a more authentic view that way. I remember watching a TV film about the photographer Fay Godwin. She was standing in a field somewhere photographing a landscape. She was about to take the picture and a car appeared in the frame. She said “let’s just wait for the car to pass” and I’m thinking No No No get the car in.

LIP: Situations obviously aren’t always as they appear, and often in “Walk on By” I see pairings or groups and wonder which people are together and who are strangers to each other. This I think is an integral aspect of your work compared to that of other street photographers. Is there a point to this?

DAVID: I think it is amusing how we look at a photograph and treat it as a sort of story. But it’s a story which exists entirely in our heads. The busy street creates a kind of cold intimacy between people which a picture fixes into something we assume is a relationship which in reality just isn’t true. It always amazes me how even very experienced photographers do this. We should know more than most how deceiving a picture can be. This goes back to what I was saying earlier – we should be able to enjoy the visual world without interpretation and narrative making.

LIP: Would you say you are sympathetic to your subjects?

DAVID: The process of shooting can be a bit aggressive I suppose and intrusive but my intention is generous and entirely positive. That doesn’t mean flattering people or being sentimental in any way. The city is often seen as cold and alienating but the sheer mass of humanity means that the possibilities of creative communication, relationship and intimacy is immense. Although I have no particular intention to express a point of view or opinion I can’t help my own sensibility coming through. I am certainly very sympathetic to my subjects. I feel a great warmth towards the people in my pictures. Perhaps when people are brought together in a picture that cold intimacy gets warmed up in a way. Well, I think that happens in my work anyway even when people look aggressive the eye contact is very human.

Just thinking about it you’ve made a very interesting observation about pairings and groups because even my earlier work, the landscapes in Scotland, are largely about comparisons between different forms and that’s what’s happening again with the “Walk On By” pictures. The eye moves around comparing one face with another so perhaps there is more continuity here than I thought.

LIP: Well in a way these pictures could be the ultimate ‘Urban Landscape’ images. The crowds of heads are like rolling hills, and individuals possibly like lone trees. Maybe that’s a stretch, but the city really is such an organic environment. What do you think?

DAVID: Hmm, yes I like that idea. Every picture is like a little world in it’s own right and is therefore a kind of landscape. The street is certainly organic and buzzing with life. Trudging along when you’re doing the shopping the street can feel boring and oppressive but if we allow ourselves to look closely it is endlessly engaging and fascinating to see and be part of the flow.

LIP: Do you have any finish line in mind for this project, or is shooting this something of a way of life for you? What’s motivating you to keep up with it?

DAVID: I don’t think I ever ‘finish’ anything I just seem to come to a stop and then eventually move on, usually with a vague intention of going back and getting it “right”. But the intention never turns to reality. We can never go back, really. I don’t think I’m ready to move on from the “Walk On By” pictures yet. I think there is a great deal more pushing of myself to do. It’s partly about exploring my ideas about what makes a ‘good’ picture but also about the mental challenge that I mentioned earlier. I said at the beginning that this sort of work is relatively easy in central London but there is still a considerable degree of fear, hesitation and reserve which I feel still has to be overcome in order to capture the ‘dance’ of the street. I’m a very shy person really and this type of work is something that only a couple of years ago I couldn’t have imagined doing. But something happened and I’m going with it.

David’s website

Interview by Tiffany Jones

Carole Rawlinson’s photography has developed in parallel with a long career as a hospital planner. It is a mixture of contemporary and documentary work and covers urban and natural landscapes and some archaeology.

After 30 years as a hospital planner, Carole has also completed two major hospital photographic projects between 2002 and 2007 – one of a new hospital being built and the other of a famous old hospital closing down. In 2006, she was awarded a Contemporary ARPS for her book called Transformations about the building of the new Evelina Children’s Hospital at St Thomas’ Hospital. In 2008, she was awarded a Contemporary FRPS for another book called Middlesex Memories about the closure of the Middlesex Hospital on Goodge Street.

Carole has had three solo exhibitions of her hospital projects and has shown work in other exhibitions including LIP annual exhibitions. She is a stock photographer for the Royal Geographical Society and has been a member of LIP and also Hampstead Photography Society for many years.

For this showcase we take a look at Carole’s landscape images from a body of work she calls Wild Places.

“I don’t go out with my camera with the hope of capturing great individual images but tend to take photographs in the context of a project or predetermined idea. My aim is to capture the essence of a destination or tell a story. ”

LIP: This series of work is quite different from your hospital documentary projects. What’s your attraction to these landscapes?

CAROLE: I enjoy the solace that comes from being in wild remote places.

When you live and work in busy urban environments and particularly if you’re experiencing major changes in your own life, the emptiness, bleakness, silence and solitude experienced in these wild places can provide a real sense of calm and peace. This is equally true of hot, cold and icy deserts. Remote wild places can also inspire awe and wonder, refresh the mind and body and allow your imagination to soar. As a result, I’ve become something of a polar and desert explorer over the past 10 years and have also developed an interest in the archeology associated with these remote destinations.

LIP: Wild Places includes photographs from Antarctic Peninsula, Iceland, Norway, Greenland, Arctic Canada and the North West Passage. Could you explain how you came to travel these places and by what means you have done it?

CAROLE: This series of journeys to cold deserts and icy landscapes began with a trip to West Greenland to see the giant icebergs which break off the glacier near Ilullisat and ultimately float across the North Atlantic and down the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. I flew to Kangerlusak and then travelled north on the local coastal steamer. After this trip I was hooked on the visual qualities of ice and the peace and solitude of icy locations.

The next trip was another coastal steamer boat trip in winter up the coast of Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, as far as the Lofoten islands where I spent a few days. My main aim on this trip was to experience and attempt to photograph the Northern lights, which I managed to do late one night from the prow of the ship. I’ve since been back to the Lofotens in the spring to photograph the dramatic mountainous landscape and also the dried cod industry.

In Iceland I wanted to experience the sheer drama and variety of the remote landscapes that this country has to offer, from cold deserts to hot springs, giant waterfalls icecaps and yet more icebergs. On this trip I drove all the way round Iceland in a 4 wheel drive.

The Antarctic peninsula I explored from a Russian icebreaker expedition ship travelling across the Drake passage from Ushuaia in Argentina. Ice, icebergs and icy landscapes were the attraction here and the feeling of almost other worldliness from being so far away from anywhere else. There was ample opportunity to go ashore and explore.

I had been interested for some time in the 19th century search for a navigable North West Passage and particularly the failed Franklin expedition of 1845 and the finally successful Amundsen expedition of 1906. So when the opportunity arose to make a trip myself to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Amundsen’s trip I took it. Again I travelled in a Russian icebreaker expedition ship from Resolute, an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle. We spent a week travelling west to Amundsen Gulf and then did the transit back in the other direction, something still only done by relatively few ships even today. The remote cold desert landscape had a real feeling of emptiness as there is little human habitation there. Signs of those earlier 19th century expeditions were apparent in several locations, evocative reminders of the hazards of those early explorations. The most poignant of these were the graves from Franklin’s expedition on the desolate beach of Beechey island. Remains of the summer tent houses and winter earth houses of the Thule people, ancestors of the Inuit were also apparent in many locations we visited.

LIP: Resolute has 24 hours of darkness in winter and 24 hours of sunlight during summer. What lighting conditions did you encounter?

CAROLE: I went through the NW Passage in late August so it was light for most of the time but not for a full 24 hours. I haven’t been in either the Arctic or Antarctic when it has been mostly dark.

LIP: What is it like traveling on an icebreaker ship, is it rough-going and what are the nights like?

CAROLE: These icebreaker ships are comfortable but not luxurious. The conditions can be very wild with strong gale force winds whipping up very heavy seas, especially crossing the Drake Passage to the Antarctic peninsula. We also had storm force conditions at times in the NW Passage. In extreme conditions, parts of the ship’s exterior were closed off to prevent passengers from going outside and slipping or being blown overboard.

LIP: Travelling these areas is quite a rare thing to do, could you tell us anything about people you met along the way, or were your experiences very solitary?

CAROLE: Because of the remoteness of these places and lack of habitation, most of the people that I met were fellow passengers or crew on board ship. Apart from them I also met some Inuit in the two Inuit communities I visited in the NW Passage and scientists at a research base in the Antarctic peninsula.

LIP: What sort of equipment were you using to keep warm and comfortable enough to make pictures in such cold climate?

CAROLE: Lots of layers of clothing and several pairs of gloves. I kept some gloves on to take photos and kept my camera in an insulated and waterproof bag so that it didn’t seize up or get wet when I was travelling or going ashore in small zodiac boats.

LIP: It seems you have traveled extensively in much warmer places, such as Namibia and Jordan. What were some of your experiences like in these places?

CAROLE: I have made two trips to Arizona and Utah drawn by the drama of the desert landscapes and also by the extensive archeological remains of the ancient Anasasi people – ancestors of the Pueblo Indians.

Apart from photographing the wide variety of hot desert landscapes, my trip to Namibia in 1998 marked the start of what became a 10 year project photographing routes around the world in icy, desert and wild locations. This project used these particular landscapes to express the feelings of loss and the search for new directions that follows multiple bereavements.

In Jordan, I wanted to see the desert landscapes like Wadi Rum made famous by Lawrence of Arabia and the Arab revolt. Camping in the desert one night, I had the memorable experience of watching desert foxes playing close by.

In Libya this year, I focused primarily on photographing the extensive archeological remains of the Roman cities of Leptis Magna and Sabratha.

LIP: What do you think the archeology of our roads, or routes, will tell about our cultures in future?

CAROLE: I don’t know how to answer this question – you’d have to ask an archeologist! In addition to my wild places images, I have photographed routes as a metaphor for expressing feelings and emotions.

LIP: What challenges do you face when photographing ice and sand?

CAROLE: Challenges in icy landscapes are keeping your camera dry and sheltered from the cold, taking several camera batteries as they don’t last as long in the cold, holding your camera still in howling gales or whilst standing up in a moving zodiac and reacting quickly to dramatic changes in the weather.

Challenges in desert landscapes are mainly keeping dust out of your camera.

LIP: Are you currently working on any new projects?

CAROLE: I have recently self-published a book via the blurb.com bookstore on my Routes project which can be found here.

Carole’s website

Interview by Tiffany Jones