Just enjoyed looking through Chris Palmer’s site which include lots of very imaginative landscapes such as this one from Iceland. I particularly liked the Fields and Ice galleries.

I’m not sure that I have a style – maybe that’s something you can decide once you’ve looked at my pictures.

That’s a pretty good philosophy, don’t you think?

Congratulations are due to Antony Spencer for his wintry picture of Corfe Castle in Dorset, which has won him this year’s British landscape photographer of the year. A well-deserving winner, a curved lead in line composition balanced by lovely subdued colours and shapes in the sky, and unlike some previous winners – and perhaps the otherwise-excellent breakfast and steam engine shot that won the young prize – Spencer’s picture is also without doubt… a landscape.

Sadly for the other winning photographers, their pictures aren’t readily available but are hidden behind the Times’s paywall, but you can see some here , here and here. Also read Tim Parkin‘s views.

Robin Whalley is a “self taught Landscape Photographer living in Saddleworth near Oldham. He draws his inspiration from the industrial and rugged landscapes of the North of England.” I was enjoying his shots of the Lake District, particularly as I’m planning on getting to Wastwater (shown here) very soon, but also check out his Torres del Paine, Patagonia, Chile. One day….

Never heard of Prague-based photographer Tono Stano before, but there are some wonderful black and white figure studies at his site. Particularly good are those under studio works – make sure you click the numbers under each strip of thumbnails.

Via the excellent Iconic Photos.

Matt Stuart is a London-based photographer with a great eye for the quirky and amusing. While he uses digital for his commercial work, he walks and shoots a couple of rolls a day on a Leica MP.

Thanks Pieter.

Nils Jorgensen‘s photography seems to be mostly round London and in streets and other public places, but he can make wonderfully-funny images in places as ordinary as this ticket machine on the Underground.

I really enjoyed looking through this site – a great eye for the hilarious.

Maciej Dakowicz is a Polish guy who ended up in Cardiff doing a PhD and started photographing the local night life in his wonderful Cardiff after Dark series.

It’s great stuff – a bit like Weegee meets Graham Smith’s Middlesbrough pub in colour – and I imagine not easy to photograph without getting your head kicked in (always a good objective). I’m not sure it makes you proud to be British, though.

Picking one of David Eisenlord’s pictures from Iceland seems appropriate right now – though we may soon be heartily sick of being downwind of the land of fire and ice. I could equally well have picked something from his wild places of the west of Ireland.

The images are hand coated platinum/palladium or gum over platinum and for me have a lovely a timeless quality – a memory of when we could still fly to Iceland, or anywhere.

bsimple‘s miminalist web site contains some wonderfully-imaginative “conceptual” photography. It only says that “all images on this website are assembled & printed in a traditional darkroom” and seems to belong to Misha Gordin, a US-based Latvian, who explained his work in this (surprisingly-readable) artist’s statement:

… in my opinion, conceptual photography is a higher form of artistic expression that places photography on the level of painting, poetry, music and sculpture. It employs the special talent of intuitive vision. By translating the personal concepts into the language of photography, it reflects the possible answers to major questions of being: birth, death and life. Creating an idea and transforming it into reality is an essential process of conceptual photography .

Today’s conventional approach, with a few exceptions, completely dominates Art Photography. But introduction of digital photography will change this balance. The ease of producing altered realities will bring a new wave of talented artists who will use it to express their special world of visions, with all its meanings, symbols and mystery.

That was written back in 1999, but I wonder how far that balance has indeed changed. Don’t we now appreciate the artistry of the highly-manipulated darkroom print much more than ever before, and dismiss the “altered realities” of highly-manipulated digital images as “just Photoshop”?

Rebekka Gudleifsdottir is further proof that while Icelanders are few in number there’s an awful lot of creativity bubbling away on that small island:

All photographs are taken by myself (also the ones with me in them) and all post-processing is done by me.
I am self-taught.
I decided to become a photographer in May of 2005.
There is nothing I would rather do.

Now that’s an artist’s statement.

Her self-portraits are outstanding, and more are at her blog which is sadly rather quiet – after all, I like ranters and not every blog has tales of eating sheep’s eyes and other things Icelanders do.

BBC Scotland’s Classics Unwrapped has a 2 hour interview with the leading classical music photographer Clive Barda – it’s on the iPlayer here [No longer available]. It’s worth hearing for the music alone, which starts with Elgar’s cello concerto performed by Jacquelin duPre (this page) who Clive photographed at the start of his career in the late 1960s, but also includes detail about the peculiar requirements of his work. Every picture has a story….

Clive’s a great friend and I’m sure he won’t mind my adding, for those interested in a bit more on his photographic workflow, it’s currently a pair of IDsMkIII cameras on the heaviest tripods imaginable, roughly 1000 frames 4/5 days a week, all managed and adjusted by himself in Lightroom (he’s a big fan), with the selected two or three dozen finished in Photoshop and, as his average ISO is 1100, in NoiseWare.

I really enjoyed reading David Ward‘s The Landscape Beyond during my recent trip to the Lake District. Apart from enjoying the photographs by this “t-shirt winning professional landscape photographer working on large format”, what stuck with me most was his comment about landscape photographers being inordinately concerned with the location where a picture was made.

I couldn’t find the quote just now and will add it later (the book’s worth another read) but this picture which isn’t in the book really illustrates the point. Can you guess where it was taken? Does it remotely matter?

Ted Leeming has a lovely set of in-camera blurred landscapes:

The landscape. What appears solid and unchanging is in reality a story of movement and evolution. Nothing remains constant. This planet and all upon it is in a state of continuous transition, both seasonally and over the eons of time. By looking at the present we are also subconsciously reading the story of a past almost as long as the history of the earth. This body of work studies the elements at play that have formed the Inner Sense of the landscape as we know it.

Not sure where I found this link, but I like Pep Ventosa’s collective snapshots so much that his description of the work has escaped being included in my artist’s statements:

Each of these works is a composite of up to one hundred snapshots of the same subject matter, taken by me or others, layered or sandwiched together to build a brand new image. Combining these common shapshots, I look for some visual substance, some illusory underlying reality that takes us to a new visual experience.

Andy Ilachinski’s site is rather cluttered and could do with the clean approach he applies to his lovely minimalist images. They’re grouped under “Entropic Melodies – Life in lifelessness” and “Timelessness Impermanence – Transient realities”, and there’s an artist’s statement too:

My imaging philosophy combines my training as a theoretical physicist, my interest in Taoist philosophy, and my love of photography as a penetrating art form: I strive to capture the subtle, interconnected web of Ch’i /energy that makes up what we “call” the world.

In the same way as all “objects” in this world are fundamentally impermanent, and essentially arbitrary, partitions of an otherwise continuous, unfragmented whole, photography is –for me– a mystical process whereby the veils of illusory fragmentation are momentarily lifted and the underlying immaterial essence of the universe is revealed.

Update: Also see Andy’s blog.

I think it’s time for another batch of artists statements….

Gary Treadwell‘s site contains some lovely b&w pictures – look for the small and rather faint navigation buttons. But:

I am interested in exploring the ‘innerness’ of things, their presence and existance [sic] in our visual language.

Found via the ever excellent Black and White Photography magazine.

Farah Mahbub is a Pakistani photographer whose site does its best to hide away his excellent pictures behind a fog of religious guff. You get to photos by choosing Personal Divergences from an annoyingly-noisy Flash menu. Then, not in the menu but stuck in the middle of the page are links such as “Serendipity“. You then have to click the resulting page’s banner or the small View Gallery to its right. Luckily, after all this, and after a title such as “Serendipity :: serendipity of consciousness just a beginning”, the visitor is spared an artist’s statement – or at least I couldn’t find one in this irritating but still very beautiful site.

David Fokos does slow exposures and writes that this reflects an underlying philosophy of how we see the world. Luckily it’s more impressionistic than transcendental:

Using long exposures ranging from 20 seconds up to 60 minutes, I have tried to filter out what I call the “visual noise” of everyday life in order to reveal the fundamental, underlying forms of our world — it is these forms that I think we respond to on a visceral level. My long time exposures average out all the short-term, temporal events — the visual noise — within a scene.

Paul Butzi’s site has some excellent mainly black and white photographs and plenty of articles on larger format film and digital printing. No artist’s statement, but the article Art is a Verb, Not a Noun worried me, until I decided I rather agree with him:

I’d like to suggest a related different set of questions to be applied to a work of art:

1. Does this work open up new avenues for me to explore?

2. Do I understand more about anything as a result of making this work?

3. Now that I’ve made this work, what will I make next?

Camille Solyagua says nothing about herself on her site, no artist’s statement or even biographical details. She’s married to Michael Kenna, and she also does some great black and white work, often rather minimalist, in a Japanese-influenced style.