Personal photography
Last week I visited the lighthouse at Cordouan, on the French Atlantic coast, not far from where I live. It’s one of those things that aren’t far, but as a local you don’t do (e.g. when I grew up in Paris it took me many years to visit the Eiffel tower the first time even though I saw it nearly every day).
One of the things I’ve struggled with lately is what I called to myself “the trap of meaningfulness”. I need to put names on things to think about them, even if it’s not the right one others use, don’t judge me.
I took this photo in 2008 with my 5D. I was on my way to the West coast of Scotland with a friend of mine (in the photo next to the monument) and we stopped on the way when I saw this monument away from the road on top of a hill. We walked to it and took some photos.
I remember it had a long list of names on a plaque, so I’m assuming it was a war monument, but I now can’t remember exactly what it said.
I’ve watched, and sometimes was involved in, countless conversations about creativity that devolve into the same tired refrain: “Quality matters more than quantity”, “creativity can’t be controlled”, and my personal favourite “I prefer creating high-value work rather than churning out rubbish”.
This thinking is nonsense.
When I lived in Scotland, I’d spend a lot of my weekends across the country on the West Coast. Especially in the winter. The scenery is spectacular there, and very sparsely populated.
Since I restarted photography after long hiatus, I decided to concentrate on monochrome. For some reason, it came naturally to me to not produce colourful images anymore.
Sometimes, you take a photo not because it’s well composed, but because its meaning strikes you.
I’m a technician. Not an artist. I have no doubt about that. So why do I pretend to make photos? (in the Ansel Adams sense)
When I was in Oslo early June, I tried to spend as much time as possible in the streets taking photos. For me, as I was there for work, it meant mainly in the morning on my way to the office. Which was good: the light was great. High enough to go between buildings, but not above them.
There is a scene in the animated series Archer where everybody is stuck in the elevator. Krieger, the mad scientist, is holding a Thermos bottle. Someone asks him: is that soup in there? And he answers in an enigmatic way: define “soup”.
