Thoughts on Remarks by Joe Cornish
I don’t think I’ve written about the joke I’ll occasionally make about almost killing Joe Cornish, God forbid! At least, that’s my way of framing it, and we’ll be doing our best to avoid doing so, because he’s such a wonderful photographer and seems like a really great guy. I guess I should put the statement I just made in some context. You see, for years we have really wanted to do a workshop with Joe. Like I said - wonderful photographer, great guy. That and he’s Ann’s favorite photographer. (Sorry Joe, but I suspect you don’t mind that mine is Brett Weston, though he’s not living so . . . no workshop opportunities there.). So about 7 years ago we found out about a workshop with Joe and David Ward (another great photographer) in Cornwall, England that we signed up for. Heck, we were going to be living in Europe by then, so it would be a “local” trip. Plus we’d be waiting for the Bimobil to be completed we needed some kind of trip to take, why not a workshop. Well, as it happened, Mother Nature decided to curse the entire planet Earth with COVID, and that workshop got cancelled. Fortunately, we were able to immediately re-schedule with the two of them for a workshop the following year, this time in Glen Coe, Scotland. Even better! Well, it’s as if Mother Nature figured we didn’t quite understand her previous message, so in the months leading up to the workshop she decided to be a bit more specific about the lesson she tried to teach us, and she caused the COVID rate to skyrocket in the UK. Looking at the infection rate projections, Ann and I decided to withdraw from that workshop . . . about two weeks before the UK closed the border to foreign tourists for the Fall. We would not have been able to attend even if we’d wanted to. Instead, we went to Maderia - technically a Portugal-Portugal trip. Then about a year later I was working at my desk and saw an email come in for a Light and Land workshop with . . . Joe Cornish and Phil Malpas in the Lake District, England. I had Ann and me signed up for the workshop within 15 minutes of receiving the Light and Land email. During the workshop we were told that there were over 150 people on the wait list, just in case anyone decided to withdraw from the workshop. Everybody wanted in on that workshop. Unfortunately, Joe was not there. Why, may you ask? Well, about 10 days before the workshop, Mother Nature decided that we are really dense and didn’t understand what she was trying to tell us, so she had to be very, very specific. How specific may you ask? Well, knock Joe Cornish off a mountain hillside with a strong gust of wind and injure his neck specific. We found out by phone call a couple of days later, while we too were in Scotland, that Joe was unable to make the workshop and would be replaced by another instructor. It took awhile, but Joe has seemingly recovered, thank goodness! Ann and I still haven’t had a workshop with Joe, but we both have decided that we are not going to try and schedule another workshop with Joe. We fear what Mother Nature’s next message on the matter might be. We heard you Mother Nature and want to leave well enough alone.
So instead of a workshop, Ann and I watch as many Joe Cornish videos as possible. And this week an interesting interview with him was released on YouTube. You can see it by clicking here.
It’s a bit long, at just over an hour, and much of it is spent discussing climate change and protecting the earth instead of photography, but it is definitely worth watching.
In it, the host of the podcast asks Joe some very good questions and Joe’s answers are even more interesting. During the podcast I decided I needed to write some of his comments down. So when he’d say something interesting, I’d stop the video and write it down as a note on my phone, then hit “play” again. That happened several times and, thankfully, Ann didn’t mind. We’d even talk a bit about some of them, with Ann asking me occasionally to pause and discuss a statement she found interesting. It was a really engaging discussion to watch and to have with Ann.
The next morning, I looked at the note and realized a lot of the comments had caused some good thinking on my part, so why not write it down. Thus this blog post.
FYI - the photographs here are for visual entertainment only. They’re all from our trip to the UK to attend the workshop that . . . Joe Cornish couldn’t attend. They are in the sequence they were chronologically made.
“Reality itself is a topic of great interest.”
This perhaps is why all photographers start pointing a camera at things. Anything. A person. A landscape. The sky. A flower. It’s interesting, and the question that slowly starts evolving is, “What does it look like when I take a picture of it?” Pictures then become photographs, and then photography becomes an exploration. But what never leaves from the process is that it is a photograph of something, and that something is reality. Reality in a way that a painting or a drawing cannot be. Photography records light reflected from a subject, it records reality. Without it (either light, or a subject), you can’t make a photograph. But the photograph isn’t the thing itself, it is a photograph of the thing or event. Why make a photograph of anything if you are not interested in the reality of it? Many people start to take photographs, they buy the gear and, in the old days, photographed a few or a lot of rolls of film. Now days, folks take pictures with digital cameras or just their phone. They take it seriously for awhile, then they stop. I think those that continue are those that, for them, the above quote has real meaning. I photograph because reality is itself a topic of great interest. Otherwise, I’d do something else. Joe’s comment is right.
“Establish a curiosity for the world.”
“Practice your seeing. Practice your photography.”
“Do what you love.”
Joe said those three sentences in a very short period of time in response to advice he would give a new photographer. I think it’s incredible advice and probably as valid for life in general as it is for photography. It’s that curiosity that keeps one pushing oneself to explore new places, try new things, and take a look at something you’ve looked at a dozen times before, only to discover something new and fascinating. I hope I never lose my curiosity for learning and discovery (aren’t they really the same?). The practice comments are just as valid. I won’t rehash why I call photographing work. Seeing and crafting images doesn’t come just by chance and you have to practice it, just as an athlete, no matter how talented she is, needs to practice simply to stay at the level they’re at. And practice harder or more often to get better. And do what you love has its own rewards, particularly when you go out and it seems like you’re accomplishing nothing. A day of going out and making a bunch of crappy photographs is better than a day of just sitting around. At least I was doing what I love, despite being disappointed with the results. Then again, getting out is how you get days of making a bunch of wonderful photographs! Do what you love! I really don’t think there is better advice for anyone interested in photography or in living an interesting life.
“I now see the landscape as an expression of the human condition.”
This quote had me thinking a lot. So much so I suspect I missed much of what he said immediately afterwards. It was on my mind all evening. Until Joe made that comment, I’d largely thought of images, my images, in one of two ways. The first way builds upon the straight-photography background I embrace. It uses the camera to see and to photograph things for what they are, and to reveal to others things they’ve never truly seen or noticed before. It truly builds upon the statement above that reality is of great interest. Given that I love being in and photographing the landscape, that’s how I generally photograph it. Striving to see what more it is. The landscape for what it is, or I guess more appropriately, the landscape as I can see it. The second way I’ve come to think about images, and the landscape, is (to use a similar phrasing), the landscape as it makes me feel. These are images intended to draw emotions from the viewer, usually trying to evoke in the viewer the emotions I had that led me to make the image. Awe, wonder, fear, violence, the sublime. So when Joe said, “I now see the landscape as an expression of the human condition” I had to think long and hard about what precisely he meant by that as well as how one might incorporate that into image making. I’ll admit now, I haven’t a clue. But now that it’s in the back of my head, I’m sure I’ll periodically think about that when I’m out photographing and maybe someday, if I’m fortunate, if I work hard enough at it, I might begin to understand what he was talking about. And maybe make a third type of image.
“Robert Adams says a good landscape photograph contains geography, autobiography and metaphor.”
It’s interesting to hear a photographer you’re watching to learn from quote another photographer that they’ve learned from. It reinforces the value of curiosity and is a reminder that we learn from everyone, nothing is truly original, and we can build on what others discover if we open ourselves to hearing what they have to say. Here, it’s a way about thinking about images and image making. Why make one image and not another? What might make one image better than another? How can I give an image something more? This simple idea - an image should contain geography, autobiography and metaphor - can aid in creating photographs that have that something “more” to them, that might make images that appeal not only to you, but to others. Drawing from some of the wording I’ve used and will use in this post, geography is about the subject, the place you’re photographing, autobiography is about me the photographer (my emotions, my background, . . .), and metaphor is about what more the image can evoke in a viewer (perhaps Joe’s “expression of the human condition”). Again, I can’t say I have a full insight into this quote, but it is thought provoking in a way I am sure will reappear in my mind at some point when I’m behind a camera or developing an image. It is statements like these that help one to see things differently, to understand the world and image making differently, and hopefully in the end, to make better images.
“Writers can deal with imagination, I have to deal with reality.”
This quote brought a lot of thoughts to my mind. The first part of it deals with a way of making creative work (including photographs) that I frankly have little interest in. From a photography perspective, I think of it as the artist using photography to create art, almost devoid of the photographic process, but for the purposes of art. It manifests itself in a number of ways - purely created studio images of the artist’s (or artistic designer’s) imagination that are then staged and photographed, photoshopped creations that are effectively a collage of images that one might otherwise paint with photorealistic accuracy, to fanciful mixings of techniques some of which are photographic and perhaps others that are not. Don’t get me wrong, I am not being critical of them and do not call them invalid or not photographs. One of the things I love about photography is its diversity and the many ways it manifests in the world, and I certainly appreciate that diversity, even the photograph as keepsake -like the photograph of Hans on my phone’s homescreen. However, the pure imagination-created image, like writing, is just not a type of photography that captures my interest (unlike the keepsake pictures I’ll make). And for the sake of saying so, I’ll add “yet.” (Though don’t hold your breath for me to start down that art path.). I may write, but I’m not a creative writer, creating stories from my imagination; nor do I photograph that way. The second statement concerns the part of photography that does interest me and the “problem” we have to deal with all too often - reality. A photograph is made from light reflecting off of the thing we are photographing. Everything. We do not have the luxury of not photographing that annoying trashcan off to the left of the image - the writer can not include it in the description, the painter can ignore it and not paint it in the frame - we, as photographers, have to figure out a way to either make a compelling image with it in the frame, or figure out a way to have it be outside the frame and still produce a compelling image, or not make the image at all. That last statement - I have to deal with reality - is one of the reasons I say good photography is hard.
“I’ll often turn an image upside down when I’m developing it to analyze the image as an abstraction.”
This comment draws from Joe’s days as an art student (it’s a technique artists use to evaluate composition) and is so very true. I wish I remembered to do it more often when I’m working on an image in Lightroom. To be honest, that’s why I think images made with a view camera are consistently better (i.e., there are more successful images in relation to the number of images made) than with regular cameras. The image on a view camera’s ground glass is upside-down and backwards. You’re literally composing the photograph using the technique artists use to make stronger compositions in their paintings. I miss those days of working with a view camera. That’s only one of the reasons. I wonder if I could convince camera manufacturers to allow us to program a button that turns the image upside-down, for compositional purposes? Hmmmmm……..
“Beauty is a kind of universal value when it comes to nature.”
What can one say other than this statement is so true. Why photograph the landscape? Because being in nature is so rewarding, and one of the ways it is rewarding is in its beauty. Again, a day out exploring a landscape is wonderful, even if you don’t come home with any great photographs. It’s even better when you do. And for us (Ann and me), with the way we photograph the camera does not get in the way of nature, it contributes to the experience of it. Once we set down our packs, we’re there exploring it for quite some time, sometimes hours. Certainly much longer than any hiker who may pass by and contemplate the location, for however long. I’m reminded of a couple that Ann and I met, twice, during one of our US trips. First, they stopped and chatted with us in Red Canyon, north of St. George, Utah. 5 days later, it was in Snow Canyon in the same area. The first stop they passed us by, did their hike and stopped to talk on their return leg because, as they put it, “We’ve done our whole hike, and you’ve only moved down the trail about 300 yards.” In Snow Canyon, they mentioned they saw us from a mile away, and we hadn’t moved from our area the whole time they hiked over to the hill we were on. They appreciated how we allowed ourselves to be immersed in the landscape. There is something about nature’s beauty I hope I never get used to.
“You absorb the cultural milieu of which you are a part.”
This statement struck home like a sledgehammer. For Joe, it came following a response that if he was never allowed to leave the UK again, he probably wouldn’t mind because he wouldn’t lack for images to make. For us, it’s the reason why Ann and I are so wanting to return to the US despite our disgust with the political environment and the insecurities that American society imposes upon its citizens. We miss the American landscape. It is the cultural milieu of which we are a part. And no matter how much we’ve tried, we have not found the equivalent in Portugal, the Netherlands, or anywhere else we’ve visited in Europe - no matter how wonderful those places may be. The landscape of the American west, in all its diversity, is our milieu. And we miss it.
“I’m increasingly seeking subtlety and complexity in imagery.”
This was an interesting statement to hear. Interesting because both Ann and I have noticed an evolution in Joe’s photographic work over the years. We’ve pretty much bought every book of his we can, so we have studied his images made over several decades. While his images are always phenomenally technically competent and precise (in an Ansel Adams sort of way), the compositional strengths of the early images were easily evident and compelling. His recent work though, is masterful. It is not as direct, or to use strange expressions, blunt or in-your-face; it is much more subtle and complex, yet none-the-less moving and compelling. The composition is hardly noticeable, but still leads your eye through an image intentionally. The images are just as, if not more, striking, yet one wonders why? Ann says I edit with a light hand; it’s nothing compared to Joe’s work. With his recent woodland photographs, Joe is able to find structure in the chaos of the forest, beauty in an image that the normal eye would miss, wonder in the most chaotic of landscapes. He truly is a master and understands what he is doing.
So when one asks why I think so much about images and image making, and the why of photography, perhaps I should respond, “Because Joe Cornish does, and look at where that’s taken him.” That wouldn’t be a bad response.