David Ward - Landscape Photography - Into The Light

This image was made on a visit to Coyote Buttes in Northern Arizona in November 2006. I was accompanied by two friends, Alex Donnelly and David Whistance. We had failed to get permits online for the north (which includes The (famous) Wave) so we had to go to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)Ranger station every morning to put our names in the lottery, a 35 mile drive from where we were staying in Page. Our names weren't drawn until the second morning so we decided to explore the south section on the first two days.

The first of these visits was to an area called Cottonwood Cove. I'd never been to Coyote Buttes South (CBS) before but some research beforehand showed that it was just as good as the north though lacking in any "set pieces". No bad thing really as there is more scope for producing something original.

It's a 35 mile drive from Page to the turnoff for the unpaved House Rock Road, then 14 miles on the dirt road (reasonable washboard surface) then turn off onto a narrow sandy track towards the abandoned ranch of Poverty Flats six miles distant (this route had been recommended by a volunteer at the BLM station as the more direct route via Paw Hole was probably impassable due to deep sand). The track was a bit hairy in places, with soft sand and rocky ledges, but we eventually made it to the ranch. Nobody had lived there since the early sixties so there was plenty of photogenic decay to make images of - in my element!

After about an hour, during which I made the image above, we set off for Cottonwood and promptly got stuck in deep sand, about fifty yards from where we had parked. We hadn't seen anybody since we left the House Rock Road and this area is the least visited part of the Wilderness Study Area so we didn't feel at all anxious... Luckily we'd bought shovels and sand ladders - no, of course we hadn't!! We set to with our bare hands to shift sand from under the wheels and put rocks and wood in the ruts for some traction. It was at this point that we discovered that our shiny SUV didn't have any drive shafts at the back - it was 2X4 instead of 4X4. No point complaining to the car hire company as the contract forbade us taking it off road anyway! After about half an hour of digging we heard another vehicle approaching. Salvation we hoped. It was a German guy called Marek who found the whole thing very amusing and proceeded to take lots of digi-snaps of me half buried under the car! He did help dig eventually and we managed to get the car out after about 40 minutes. We asked him what the road was like to Cottonwood and he told us that it was fine, or at least no worse than the ground we had already covered. Suitably reassured we set off for Cottonwood.

You can probably guess what happened next - surprise, surprise we got stuck (again!) We tried to dig the car out for about 50 minutes but only managed to move it about six feet. It was around 14:00 by this time and we had to decide whether to stay with the car or try and walk out. If we followed the road back it would be around 15 miles before we would get to anywhere that we might see somebody else. Alternatively we could cut across country to Coyote Buttes north (CBN) and hope to meet somebody at the Wire Pass entrance as they left around sunset. We knew that there were 20 people in CBN so this was probably our best chance of help. We hadn't seen any more sign of anybody since Marek had left so the alternative was to spend an unknown number of nights waiting with the vehicle. The BLM station had had 14 spare permits out of a possible 20 for Cottonwood after we got ours, so we knew that there couldn't be all that many people around.

We made the decision to walk out via CBN and thought that we would take our camera gear in case we saw something we wanted to photograph en route. We set off up the track and after about a mile came to the crest of the first ridge. It was at this point that we realised the enormity of the task ahead and that we probably wouldn't get a chance to make any images on the way! We could barely see the back of CBN and estimated that it was over 5 miles away. This would make the total distance to walk around 9 to 10 miles across rough terrain, both bare rock and soft sand carrying around 45 pounds each. Aaargh!!

I was feeling very pissed off about getting us stuck, despite assurances from Alex and David that they wouldn't even have got as far as we had if they'd been driving. This was the first time that this had happened to me in 20 years driving to inaccessible places, and I set off at a (grumpy) sharpish pace. In retrospect this was very lucky for us. It took us around three hours to get to The Wave in CBN. We'd only stopped once on the way for about ten minutes breather to eat a snack and drink some water. Sunset was around 17:30 so we knew that we were cutting it fine. There was a small pond in The Wave due to recent heavy rain (the same storm that had wiped out the ladders in Antelope). Alex decided to take his boots off but David and I just waded through. It was a good job that we did as I heard voices as we came out of the canyon on the other side. A couple were just walking past and they told us that they were the last people there! They were amazed that we had walked that far with all our gear and were more than happy to offer us a lift (luckily they had a big enough vehicle parked at Wire Pass). The rest of the walk was reasonably uneventful, though I felt that my legs had turned to lead by the time we reached the dry wash and the last half mile before the car park.

It turned out that our saviors were staying at the same hotel in Page. We offered to buy them dinner in return for their lift and arranged to meet them around 21:00. I went back to my room and had a vigorous shower to remove several pounds of sand from my ears followed by a long soak in the bath. Around 20:30 Alex knocked on my door to say that he'd found somebody to tow the car out for a couple of hundred bucks, the only problem was that they wanted to do it now! It was too good an offer to turn down but as I was the driver on the hire agreement it meant that I would have to forego dinner. The guys that Alex had met were the Navajo guides from Upper Antelope Canyon. I set off with them to pick up a bigger vehicle from the Reservation. I didn't think very much about this until we transferred to the other vehicle and they loaded a lot of equipment on board including jacks, shovels, ropes, and lastly a high powered lamp and a hunting rifle. It suddenly occurred to me that I was driving off into the middle of nowhere with a pocket full of cash and three guys that I didn't really know who also had a gun. The clincher was when then made me where a T-shirt with a target mark on the front - just kidding!

It took about an hour and a half to get back to the car. The Navajos were all really nice guys. Chatting on the way there they said that there was only one towing company in Page. They had had a fire on one of the vehicles that they use to ferry people up the dry wash to the canyon and asked the tow company to quote for removing the vehicle as they couldn't shift it with their trucks. He wanted $800 even though the vehicle was only about half a mile from the main road so God knows how much he would have charged us to pick up our car. I had contemplated telling the car hire company that we had been abducted by aliens and dumped in the middle of the desert but decided that they would probably still charge us a fortune even though they would probably have believed us.

It turned out that there weren't any tow points anywhere on the vehicle so they couldn't just pull it out. They used their shovels to dig away the worst of the sand, lowered the tyre pressures and managed to drive it out, with four of us pushing, within 15 minutes of us reaching the car. A great adventure (in retrospect) but a little worrying at times.

The next day was supposed to be a rest day. Alex had gone off early to put our names in the lottery for permits for CBN. When David and I arrived around 09:30 he was grinning from ear to ear and we rightly assumed that we had got the permits. We decided to spend the day in an area in Coyote Buttes south (CBS) called Paw Hole and had been assured that we would have no difficulty getting there in our vehicle. It was only supposed to be a short walk from the car park but when we left the House Rock Road we found the track quite tricky and bailed out after about a mile because we were (understandably) a little paranoid about getting stuck again. We then had to walk for about 3 kilometers uphill in soft sand. The rock formations were good but nowhere near as impressive as those we had seen on the previous day. We were all fairly tired on the walk back at the end of the day but looking forward to the next day. But that's another story (or post anyway).

The structure of living things fascinates me. The great natural philosopher Robert Hooke noted in the 17th century how when you studied man made objects through a lens the structure became cruder the higher the magnification, whereas natural objects revealed finer and finer detail the more you magnified them. There is a deep beauty in natural forms.

Ferns are a particular favourite of mine because of the elegance and simplicity of the structure of each frond. Mathematicians have realised in the last thirty years that they can model infinitely complex structures by using simple equations repeated many times with the result from one fed back in as the variable in the next. The most famous of these fractal equations is probably the Mandelbrot set - something often dismissively used as a screen saver. The fern can be modeled using such a simple equation, great beauty arising from simplicity.

Kyriakos Kalorkoti is a professor of mathematics who also happens to be addicted to landscape photography and a producer of very fine images. I'm priveleged to know him and we have had many fascinating discussions about photography, reality and art. In an article on his website he writes about the old question of whether photography is Art (note the capitalisation!):"Much effort has been expended by various critics on the question of whether photography is Art; i.e., can it be included in the growing set of work and activities that are labeled as Art (since there is no generally accepted a priory definition of Art). One of the objections is the fact that a photograph is an image of some existing physical reality (ignoring manipulations).This objection can only be entertained if we go with the facile view that material existence is somehow mundane and thus is of no particular interest to Art; put briefly the view seems partly to be that material existence is no rival to imagination and all that photography can do is to record it. In fact existence of any kind is deeply problematic and mysterious; the nature of material reality is by no means straightforward and is thus more than a fitting source for image making that aims at transformation and revelation."

I find myself so strongly in agreement with this insight!

Why do we praise representations from our imagination above those springing from reality? Photography is partly to blame for this. Before the discovery of the photographic process a large proportion of the effort of painters was applied to producing the most realistic rendition of the world possible on a canvass - that is not to say that the objects or subjects depicted existed but just that they looked as if they might. In other words Art strove to not only express the thoughts or emotions of the artist (or their patron!) but to do so in as "truthful" a way as possible. Making the image look "real" leant it weight as document. Along comes photography, a mechanical process that effortlessly produces images drawn from the stuff of reality. The painter's years of effort suddenly seemed for nought, how could they compete? A new direction was needed and what was left but to travel further into the realms of the imagination. That doesn't make the study of reality in photography invalid, it just makes it something that photography can do better than painting.

I'm fascinated by how photography allows us a new insight into reality by giving us access to different visual fields; insights such as "distorted" perspectives (either compressed or elongated through using long or short focal lengths). Or colour without the in-built filtration applied by our minds. Or the compression of four dimensions into two. I intend to use this space to discuss some of these ideas and to talk more personally about the image making process. The blog is new but I've been making images for 20 years and more so I'll be posting both old and new images and writing a little about each; sometimes profound, sometimes irreverent.

This image was made on a recent visit to Scotland leading a photographic workshop. I think that it typifies some of the elements that I strive for in an image: simplicity, strong lines, contrasting colours. It also demonstrates how an image can be found almost anywhere. There was nothing special about this bank of snow other than the way the morning sun was just grazing the tops of the grass giving the colour contrast with the blue-sky lit shadowed snow.

Continuing the winter theme from my last post...

I'm often asked by workshop participants to give them the secrets of good composition, "What are the rules?" they ask. In reply I usually paraphrase a comment made by Edward Weston, "To consult the rules of composition before making a photograph is a little like consulting the law of gravity before going for a walk. Irrelevant!"

For me the very best images always break the rules, they surprise the viewer with a new way of seeing the world. What intrigued me about this view was that the fabric of the landscape appears to be almost wafer thin - a tear in the fabric allows us to glimpse sky below and beyond the surface of the ground. Visual ambiguity in a photograph can not only be arresting but also adds a sense of mystery. Humans have evolved to seek early resolution to visual problems and where this isn't possible an image will hold the viewer's attention for longer - think of the work M.C. Escher such as the hooded figures ascending a neverending staircase. So, rather than seeking to describe the landscape in a way that is instantly understood we would do better to try and confound the viewer's expectations. Rules are never going to get us to this point!

At the tender age of 46 I've finally won a photography competition (the first and, so far, only competition I've entered) at choose-film.com.

I've very mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it's deeply satisfying to be patted on the back and told that one has done well, especially as in this case the 'award' was received as a result of voting on the site by my peers. Artists of all flavours are deeply insecure creatures driven to some extent by their egos. Self-criticism is a vital part of the artistic process but it's a tricky balancing act that can lead to us all attacking our own work as worthless. Insightful external criticism is always valuable and can help us to avoid the deep lows and achieve new heights both in our mood and in the quality of our work.

On the other hand I'm philosophically opposed to the basic concept of photo competitions. Photography, like all art forms, cannot be judged in an absolute way. Photography is a matter of taste. How one feels about an image is just that, a feeling. It cannot be categorically stated that one image is better than another. The work of one great master, such as Ansel Adams, cannot be said to be better than that of another, such as Edward Weston. They are simply different.