landlocked
Like many people, my
earliest memories of taking photographs was whilst on family holidays,
inevitably by the seaside as part of that familiar ritual of the
holiday snapshot. Living most of my life near the centre of England,
just about as far from the coast as you can get, I have always
had an inexplicable, romantic yearning to be by the sea. I have
made some of my most personally meaningful images at the coast
and what I guess were some of my first “serious”
photographs in this unfamiliar and yet simultaneously strangely
familiar environment whilst still a student well over twenty
years ago. It was only much later that I realised their significance.
The pictures I have selected here
represent some recent examples of a new direction in my work,
an idea that has been a long time in gestation. This idea has
its roots in some of my very earliest photographs and overlaps
both conceptually and chronologically with a current project I
am now concluding called “Growing up in the Countryside”,
(q.v.) Whereas this earlier work is very much concerned with a
personal relationship to my local environment, the pictures here
are all made in places where I am merely a visitor passing through.
Not intended to be simple documents of places or subjects, like
all my work, the images should be seen as “mirrors”
rather than “windows” reflecting
certain feelings, moods and states of mind. The images share common
autobiographical, and allegorical qualities. They are also open
to potential personal interpretation on the part of the viewer,
depending on what the viewer may bring to the act of looking at
the images from their own experiences.
For
a long time now my work has been concerned with making photographs
within and of landscapes, but not necessarily entirely about
those landscapes. In much of my work, what is photographed is
not necessarily the subject of the picture. This sounds contradictory
and can be hard to accept, particularly with a medium like photography
which, because of its power to record the surface detail of things
with such convincing fidelity, we have learned in our credulity
to accept as so called “truth”. In a way, what I am
attempting to do is to find a personal truth through working with
this widely accepted lie. A literary analogy might be found in
a quote from the late American poet John Ciardi: “Poetry
lies its way to the truth.”
Much
of my recent work uses Polaroid SX 70 film. I use this format
because I like the size and intensity of the images which encourages
a certain intimacy which for me is an important factor when engaging
with the work. They are unfashionably small, quiet images
which require close, intimate examination and a degree of looking
into rather than just looking at. At the moment I feel
it is still too early to tell in what direction this new work
will go. I’ll just have to wait and see . . .
Adrian Pinckard
browse
all 'landlocked' images>