PROMONOTORY OF THE SANCTUARY /
CHRIS LITTLEWOOD Stretching across two archipelagos, with over 150 islands, 20 estuaries and thousands of lochs and tidal inlets, the topography of Scotland's west coast is so heavily indented that it appears to splinter and dissolve into the North Atlantic. Seemingly composed of land and water in equal measure, it is hard to imagine a wilder place in Britain or Ireland.
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C4 JOURNAL BOOK REVIEW /
EUGENIE SHINKLEI’ve been wondering lately why it is that abstract photography is so often assumed to be politically neutral. It’s tempting to treat the experience of abstract images as a kind of formal exercise or ocular game, but there’s no rule that says a photograph must resemble the real world in order to express concerns about that world. Continue reading...
LENSCULTURE BOOK REVIEW /
JOANNA L. CRESSWELL
Spend an extended period of time in one of the UK’s wilder places, and you’ll begin to understand a bit of the atmosphere that the island’s poets and nature writers have spoken about across the centuries. Verdant and stone-laden, wet and wistful, rugged and murky, water dark, air crisp, light dappled and hills haunted by the weight of history —these are just some of the ways it could be, and has been, described. Of course, there are few, if any, places in Britain we could truly call wild these days, but if pressed, the more remote areas of Scotland would likely come closest. Continue reading...
NOT NEGATIVE /
MARTIN BARNES There is something powerfully primal about Oliver Raymond-Barker’s most recent photographs. Passages of flaring light, blurred boundaries and hard shadows mix with vaporous swirls and smudges. They give the impression of an eye opening from slumber onto a world that is not yet fully formed, a realm that is intuited rather than understood. Continue reading...
TRINITY /
NICK HUNT He approaches from the south, a small man in a ragged robe. He comes carefully through these woods. There is no razor wire. Sunlight and shadows slide off him, spiderwebs break silently. The skeletons of dead leaves cling to his rough hair. Continue reading...
NICK HUNT He approaches from the south, a small man in a ragged robe. He comes carefully through these woods. There is no razor wire. Sunlight and shadows slide off him, spiderwebs break silently. The skeletons of dead leaves cling to his rough hair. Continue reading...
TINY MINERS /
DR CHRIS BRYAN Mining is perhaps the second oldest profession (well, certainly the third oldest) but as with most things it seems, nature has been doing it for far longer. As life coalesced from the primordial soup, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere and photosynthesis was not even a glimmer in evolution’s eye.
ELEMENTAL ANALYSIS /
DR CAITLIN DE SILVEY Geologist J. B. Hill visited the Carnon Valley in 1902 during a survey of geological deposits and associated industries in the region of Falmouth and Truro. Continue reading...
POWER OF LIMITS / OLIVER RAYMOND BARKER ‘To fix one’s own car is not merely to use up time, it is to have a different experience of time, of one’s car, and of oneself.’ Crawford, 2010 Continue reading...
PHOTO PRIMITIVE /
MANOR MAGAZINE Two 21st century artists reworking early photographic practices in a response to contemporary land and place talk about their work. Continue reading...
BEYOND TONGUES / OLIVER RAYMOND BARKER As a climber I have the visceral knowledge that stone is alive. Minutes, hours, days & years spent on rock have given me an opportunity to listen to it’s song. It crashes and rumbles, creaks and groans, whistles and hums. However, it lives and speaks to us on another level - a subtle yet altogether more powerful pitch - a language beyond tongues.