Throughout the duration of this project I have been researching external information, artists, photographers and theories that have an influence on my educated inspiration within my photographic practice. However, something that I have completely overlooked in my practice before is pointing the inspiration from the internal factors that make me the human being I am. So this is a blog post that is from me and while I am writing it I hope to gather and reflect on all the factors that internally inspire me to be a landscape photographer.
So this is me, a little boy up on Dartmoor. Much of my childhood memories come from spending many summers up on the Moors with my parents and grandparents. Throughout the summer holidays, when both of my parents were working, my brother and I would spend lots of time with my grandparents where we would go onto the Moors, play at the beach and ride horses (with horsey Nanna)
From left to right- Myself, My brother Elliot and cousin Callum
I want to let the photographs do a lot of the talking as I am going through a visual documentation of my life and the adventures that I have had. Heading out of my childhood and into my teenage years and I was fixated on mountain biking. I began working in a bike shop when I was 14 and most of my weekends were spent riding bikes with my family and friends. As I grew a bit older and it wasn't as cool to spend the weekend biking with your mum I would go off with mates in the woods building the biggest jumps we go tackle.
To give some context to the things that were going on in my life as a teenager. When I was around 13/14 ( I can't really remember) my parents split up which has only been seen as a good thing for me. It meant that my brother and I could have better relationships with our parents and we ended up doing different things with them which meant more fun for us. Much of my time with our mum was spent outdoors, exploring and walking. With our Dad I spent a lot of time with him playing music, we both play the trumpet and lots of my childhood memories also come from playing with brass bands. This has not directly influenced my photographic practice however it has definitely shaped the person who I am now. My first creative and expressive outlet came from music, I first started playing the trumpet when I was around 7 and it has played a huge part in my life.
Exploration
In 2014 my mum started dating her partner Peter. Pete has lived a well traveled life and sailed around many parts of the world. We have been fortunate enough to have sailed around the Caribbean, Scotland the Mediterranean and in and around the South West of the UK. In 2014/15 over the Christmas period we joined Peter out in Barbados and spent two weeks sailing around the Islands of the Caribbean. This was a completely different culture to what I had ever experienced before. I took my camera and was photographing everything...until...Petes boat got broken into and my camera was stolen...this was extremely annoying as I now have very few photographs from that trip. However, lots of memories of which I could sit here and talk about for days...
In 2016, we climbed Ben Nevis which is the highest peak in the Uk and my mum was then hooked so we then had to climb Scafell Pike (Highest peak in England) and Snowdon (highest peak in Wales) which makes the three peaks.
Doing these three challenges was incredibly fun and definitely plays a part in influencing my love and passion for being outdoors. It was around this time in my later teenage years when I began to take a camera with me on these expeditions. I began to document the space that I was exploring as well as the people that I was with. I was curious to work out how my photographs could tell the story of our journeys and this is what I began to do.
In 2018 I went on my first skiing holiday with my dad. Since that holiday I have been hooked to the mountains and skiing. I returned in 2019 and unfortunately missed the last two seasons due to the coronavirus. I have lots of plans to go back to the mountains so that I can ski and and shoot photographs with my now developed photographic practice and style.
During my last year of sixth form, I then decided that I was going to train to do the Ten Tors 55 event. This is probably still one of the toughest challenges that I have endured myself into. Hiking across Dartmoor for 55 miles across a 2 day period was not easy and unfortunately I did not manage to finish the event. However, throughout the training period, I was working on my final A Level photography project and I made my first book with the images that I shot showing the journey of our training. It was during this period of time when I decided that I wanted to be a photographer, I had such a passion for taking photographs and telling stories through my imagery. I became fascinated with shooting the landscape and the people that I am with. This is something that is still very much present in my photographic practice.
The year after I left school I continued to support the Ten Tors Training, I was then asked if I wanted to give the 55 event another go which was an opportunity that I could not turn down. I did then complete the event with a fantastic team of people.
My love for the mountains returns. In the summer after I finished my A levels I organized a Three Peaks challenge expedition with a group of my mates. The challenge is to hike all three of the highest Peaks in the UK in a 24 hour period. We hired a minibus, my dad and Hugo’s were our support team and drove us in between the mountains so that we could sleep. We did the event to raise money for Rowcroft hospice where both of my Mum’s parents were cared for before they passed away. This expedition was quite personal for me and I see it in memory of my grandparents which is why I decided to have the three peaks tattooed on my arm when I was 19.
In 2018, during my first Ten Tors training I met Robert Darch. This was at the beginning of a new photographic project for him where he wanted to capture the training process of the Ten Tors. He got in touch with the school that I was at and spent many weekends on the Moors with us during our training period…(including a blue light assisted exit off the Moors). Rob and I became good friends and during this period of my life it was interesting to have lots of long chats about being a photographer. As I have mentioned above, it was during this period of time when I decided that I was going to pursue photography. Rob and I still stay in touch and he is really supportive when I have any random photographic questions.
The Ten Tors has a big place in my life and prehaps an even bigger influence on my photographic practice. Since leaving school, I have volunteered as a leader on Ten Tors and Duke of Edinburgh training weekend with South Dartmoor Community college. I am always taking my camera out with me and photographing the land and the students that are out with us. Unfortunately due to the pandemic we have not been able to train for the past year. I am very much looking forward to spending much more time out on the Moors training young people how to navigate and stay safe on the Moor.
During my first year of Uni and over the summer between 1st and 2nd year I spent quite a bit of time volunteering at the off grid community “Land Matters”. Here I experienced a new way of living life, one that I feel incredibly drawn to and will definitely explore further in the future. My photographic practice was challenged here as it was the first social documentary project that I worked on. It was an incredible experience and I learnt about the philosophy of permaculture which definitely made me feel more connected to the land that is around me. I think that this experience influenced the way in which I was thinking about life and the way I want to live it. My connection with the land is a huge part of my life, I am always out and about exploring as it makes me feel alive.
Matthew and I have been friends since we were very young. Both of us have grown up and directed our lives to make visual work. Matt is an incredibly talented videographer and we quite often work on projects together. Matt and I have spent lots of time exploring as well as making visual work. We will quite often pitch ideas to each other and go out and create. We work incredibly well together and are quite often thinking about the same things. We have worked together in an artist and semi commercial sense having shot a music video together which is something we intend on doing more of in the future.
My parents are the most supportive people in my life and I am forever grateful for the relationship that I have with both of them. Since leaving home and becoming more independent my relationship has changed with them. An incredibly special friendship has formed between myself and the both of them and we are constantly in touch and catching up with what is going on in our lives. Luckily I do not live too far away from them so I quite often visit them. My Dad lives by the coast so we quite often go on coastal walks and enjoy the beaches in the summer. Whereas my mum isn't a massive fan of sand so we are quite often trekking across the Moors. Both of these areas of land are fairly common in my photographic work.
My brother Elliot has been quite a big part of my photographic development ( I bet he would be pleased to hear that!) Elliot and I have a great friendship and having spent a lot of time together it has only been natural for me to take photographs of him. I am growing a reflective documentation of Elliot as he is turning into a young adult. Something which I enjoy to look through as a memory of all the good times we have together.
One year ago I brought my first van and I may have got slightly hooked on them. It has been a long time dream to own a van that I would be able to live in and travel wherever I want to go to. Well last summer, I bought a VW T25 (the one on the right) and spent a lot of the summer travelling around Devon and Cornwall exploring and photographing my adventures. I have recently sold that van and brought a much bigger one. This van is going to be my home as I am making the dream happen and I will be living the van life by the end of the summer. There are many reasons why I have decided that I am going to live my life like this, however, the main reason being that I am going to have way more freedom to travel and experience photographic worthy moments more frequently.
As soon as I started thinking and writing about all of the things that have influenced my photographic practice I realised that I could probably write a whole book on it. This is why I have tried to keep everything as short and sweet as possible. I have been incredibly fortunate to experience a lot of things already in my life, only mentioning here a few of the things that I think are most relevant to my photography. I work incredibly hard for the things that I have achieved in my life and I do pride myself on that hard work. I have been fortunate but as a young adult nothing has been handed to me, I feel like I am getting out of life what I am putting into it. My photographic practice has developed as I have put many hours in experiencing new things and developing the skills needed to create good photography. I know that I am a far way off being a master of my craft, however, taking the time to reflect on the journey I have been on, I think I can confidently say that I am on the right track.
I think that there are two main influences that inspire my relationship with the land. All my childhood was spent being outside and that has been a constant throughout my life. Whenever something goes wrong and I am not happy, it is the land where I go to feel free and refreshed from the madness of the world that is around. I spoke a lot about this in my project “Untitled Thought- Seeking Silence '' where I was escaping into the landscape to find silence and peace. Throughout my whole life, the outdoors and being in the land has been a happy consent, it's where I feel my best and I am always saying to myself that this is what life is about when I am in the land. This is perhaps one of my biggest draws to living in a van as well, I do not enjoy being inside a concrete building, it's just not for me.
Secondly, over the recent years I have been working incredibly hard in many aspects of my life. Doing my degree is not the center of my life, I only see it as one of the things that I am working on at the moment. I have my photographic business, I've been working as a roofing to save money for the van build, I have my volunteering and my degree. Sometimes all of this gets on top of me and I find that escaping to an isolated part of the Moor is incredibly liberating.
My photographic identity is developing and its clear that I like to work in the landscape as it is where I feel at peace. It is these ideas of the sublime, peace, silence and happiness that I want to convey and want to learn how to convey in my photographic practice. This is so that I can share a feeling of being alive that I cannot explain in words. The landscape is where I feel at home, it's more powerful than the superficial system that we live in and my goal is to live a life that is connected to the land in a peaceful and harmless way.