Over the past couple of years, I have become increasingly disenchanted with landscape photography. Landscape photography locations are increasingly well-known so there is an inevitable sameness about the photographs be they in Scotland, Iceland or elsewhere. Wide views of landscape, taken in good weather, in the ‘golden hours’ around sunrise or sunset or sometimes, with the Milky Way. If there’s water in the picture, it’s often blurred by the use of long exposures to give a milky effect. The photographs produced are often striking but, for me, they are somehow lacking - they capture the beauty of the landscape but are impersonal and formulaic.
I recently attended a talk by a Dutch landscape photographer called Theo Bosboom, and I was really impressed by his work. He introduced me to the term ‘intimate landscapes’ where, instead of focusing on the breadth of a landscape, we look more closely at an aspect of the landscape - the shape of a rock, lichen on a bridge, leaves in a stream and so on. I subsequently discovered that my disenchantment with conventional landscape photography is shared by lots of photographers who are focusing on these intimate landscapes.
So, although I won't stop taking wide-ranging landscapes, I've decided to spend more time looking more closely at the places and concentrating on 'landscapes in the small' rather than 'landscapes in the large'.