Nicolas White is a photographer who I collect inspiration from a lot of the time when shooting landscape work. A close to home guy who’s interest of Dartmoor started an analytical approach to photographing and documenting the landscapes that he explores. After graduating from PCA he went on to shoot his first self funded project in the Scottish Highlands “Black Dots”. A photographic exploration of mountain Bothies and a documentation of the time that he spent in them while hiking in the highlands. This project kick-started Whites fine art career and won him The Royal Photographic Society Environmental Bursary which has allowed him to fund his current work in progress “Carpathia” which is documents the rebuilding of a National park in the Carpathian mountains, Romania.
Nic whites work is primarily shot on 5x4 field camera which gives an immense amount of detail and depth to his landscape photographs. Much of his work is shot in isolated locations and he will spend days alone shooting his work before he comes back to the lab to develop his slides. I gathered visual inspiration from “Black Dots” when I shot my project “The Forgotten Moor” which was a photographic enquiry of the mines and quarries that once ran the economy of Dartmoor. This inspiration has carried through to my current project but for a different reason. The feeling of isolation and connection with the landscape is something which reminisces. Standing in a completely natural space with silence all around, with the slow and peaceful process of setting up your camera and releasing the shutter at the moment you have been waiting for. This is what connects me to White process and thinking when he shot “Black Dots”
Here is a selection of images from “ Black dots”. The Bothies are photographed mostly from afar and sometimes take a little bit of looking to be found in the vast landscapes that White has captured. The connection between the viewer and the Bothie makes the viewer small and isolated from the outside world. In landscape photography, it is easy to connect with the only man-made feature in the image, something that feels familiar in an unfamiliar space. When this feature is overlooked and surrounded by such a large space, it can make the viewer small and relatively insignificant to the location that has been shot. This introduces a feeling of isolation and smallness which for me creates a moment of silence in the image. A moment that takes you out of the madness of everyday life and into a space that is controlled by the powers of nature. It is this feeling that I am creating in my work “Untitled Thought- Seeking Silence” A feeling that will take my viewer into a peaceful and silent state of mind. I am doing this by shooing large sea and landscapes to create the feeling of being small in the natural world.
Nicolas White
Dan Dayment
Here is one of my images next to one of Whites. I wanted to place these next to each other as the horizontal lines on both of the photographs draw the viewer around the photographs in a similar way. There is a lot more going on in Whites photograph, he has captured the land, sky and clouds/ mist. I think that my more simple photograph creates the silence and peace that I am trying to portray to my audience. I toned the sky the same to add some negative space into half of the photograph. This empty space gives the viewer space and time to take in the textures of the land beneath it. In contrast, Whites photograph takes the viewer into a much bigger and vast landscape, a space which you could get lost in which gives you the feeling of being isolated which for some might link to thoughts of silence.