Photography Is A Greedy Medium

It is clearly no coincidence that impressionism in art coincided with the development of photography. Once you could capture a true image of a scene or a person on paper or film, the school of art that strived to ape nature became redundant in the click of a shutter. Once you could get a daguerreotype of Auntie Winnie - warts and all - the last thing you needed to do was to employ some itinerant artist to do a similar job. If you did employ an artist, far better that he, or she, produce an impression of the fragrant Winnie as she wafted her way through life many decades ago.

But photography is a greedy medium: no sooner had it captured the representational market, it made a play for the impressionist work. You could even pretend that you had accidentally got the photo of Ethel and Joan and their boys out of focus and still come up with an impressionist masterpiece. 

Sheffield in winter becomes a steel symphony of light and shade.

The leaden skies seem to evaporate from the Lakeland hills.

The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Walker

We are getting close to the start of the Olympic Games and with that normal outburst of Olympian enthusiasm I will find myself sitting up in the middle of the night on the edge of my seat drawn by the drama of some first elimination heat in some obscure sport I would never normally consider watching in a thousand metres. Take, for example, walking: now there's a silly sport if ever there was one. If you want to go fast, why not run? It is an event for purposely limited potential - which, in a strange way, is my kind of event.

I am a photographer not an artist. My potential is limited by the camera lens and the digital editing software. If I had ambitions to go fast - in an artistic sense - I would paint or sculpt and let my imagination fly free, just like my brother. But as a photographer I am bound by self-imposed rules : one sense has to be on the ground at all times. Occasionally I will think about breaking into a trot - like when I started to colour this old 1901 glass plate negative of Norrkoping in Sweden. And then I remember I am a walker and not a runner. It is the lot of a photographer.