Tim Parkin - Landscape Photographer

“Photography to me is a creative art. It is not simply an illustrative or interpretive medium. An artist creates according to his deepest feeling – his emotional inspiration. He cannot evoke these feelings, together with their fulfilment in an objective work, on order. It has to come from within himself… I try, not always with success, to photograph only what stimulates a recognition of beauty, either that which is intrinsic in the objects of nature or is a manifestation of the wonderful relationships of things in the natural world.” – Eliot Porter

Eliot Porter may not be the first person to photograph the landscape in colour but he is certainly the first person to make a significant impact doing so. Eliot’s first accomplishment was to have a black and white show presented at Alfred Steiglitz’s Manhattan exhibition room. With the only two other people to have been selected by Steiglitz for this honour being Paul Strand and Ansel Adams, we can see why there was an enormous interest in Eliot for the start. He wasn’t even a photographer at the time although his bacteriolgist career quickly took a back seat as his black and white bird word was rejected for publication with the suggestion that he try colour. Eliot then went on to create a book of bird photography taken with a 4×5 camera!

This book covers the journey from these auspicious beginnings through Eliot’s travels around the world, taking in China, Greece, Antartica and the Galapagos along the way. Throughout the book, extra large colour plates are included of his most significant and most interesting works with occasional dips into documentary and architecture.

For me, Eliot’s vision is still as fresh now as it was when he first created the foundations upon which colour wildlife and, more importantly, landscape photography are based. He is in many ways the landscape photographer’s landscape photographer. In his work you can see the germs of ideas that are now in common usage; colours reflections on flowing water, the use of weather conditions in affecting how colour is distributed through the landscape. In many ways, he is the photographers Cezanne, a master of colour and an experimental scientist at heart.

I’ve included a couple of pictures from the book that show a part of the range of colour photography that Eliot’s work encompassed.The first picture of the yellow beech leaves against a dark blue grey granite is one that has been a mainstay of US landscape photographers ever since. The next is a shot that graced Eliot Porters masterpiece “In wildness is the preservation of the world”, where he uses reflected colour and the contrast of inky blue water with the yellow beech leaves to create what has to be one of my favourite Porter photographs. Number three is what must be the germ of a whole repertoire of work by Christopher Burkett and many other woodland photographers (including a feel not dismilar to Shinzo Maeda). The black and white trunks of the birch trees in number four contrast in a most peculiar way, almost forming a negative of itself within the picture. The red and white seaweed and blue rocks of the coastal shot show a casual composition that looks so easy until you try to acheive this effect yourself. The run of white seaweed holds the whole together like parcel tape. Finally, a picture that reflects some of Porters interest in the eastern arts. The simple, almost monotone colours of the picture, slowly receding to blues with the bulk of the rock on the left balanced by the dark greens of the forest on the right show, again, Porter’s ability to create remarkably balanced compositions that bely their initially casual nature. You can probably tell by the way I’m talking about these pictures that I’m a big fan and the prices of these books are going up all the time (mine cost me £10 but the cheapest at the moment is about £25).