The Imagery

I traveled by rail for a month through England, Scotland, and Wales before settling in Trebetherick, Cornwall. Once there, I stayed in Angus, just of Daymer Lane, a cottage where my aunt, Polly Tatum, spent her holidays as a child. Before arriving in Britain, I had immersed myself in oriental art. I imagined myself to be a Chinese scholar wandering through a Song Dynasty monochrome ink painting, a fitting fantasy for the moods of the British landscape. When I set up my camera and crawled under my focusing cloth, I saw compositions on the flat surface of the ground glass akin to those of Japanese woodblock prints, with their interlocking, angular components of rocks, trees, water, and open space, all spread across the page with equal weight.

The Cornish imagery shows the rocks of the tidal zone by the sea at Trebetherick. There, I found myself in a rock garden whose forms shifted incessantly in the light, waves, and tides. However familiar the landmarks became, they were never the same. At high tide, there were crashing waves. At low tide, there were pools among the sand and multicolored rocks and trickling streams flowing out of them.

I developed my negatives when I arrived back in the U.S. All the while I was in Britain, I imagined them as more or less two-dimensional oriental compostitions, with an implied space rather than an illusionistic one. I thought of illusionist space as too literal. While I thoroughly enjoyed the landscape for what it was, I wanted my images to be abstracted compositions and not simple illustrations.

When I began to print my pictures, I was disappointed to see many of them in three dimensions. I thought I had failed and did not see the pictures as my own. These were mainly the images from the Lakes District and North Wales. Eventually, I accepted them as closer to British landscape paintings and prints than oriental ones. I no longer minded, because in my visits to British art museums I had become partial to the work of artists such as Turner, Cotman, and Palmer. I felt their presence in the landscape wherever I went. It was an intimate, inhabited wilderness enveloped by continually shifting light, clouds, and atmosphere. It was a landscape that existed through time, with no single concrete definition.

I have often felt that the unconconscious asserts more control over photography than deliberate intentions. I was seeing a perfectly coherent portfolio of images on my ground glass, with strongly oriental overtones, but was actually producing a set of images more appriate for the places where I photographed. That is putting it too simply. There is a blend of the two approaches in the portfolio.

The play between two and three-dimensional space comes through in many of the images. The space shifts like the landscape. In some it is clear. In others it is less tangible. In all, the forms emerge out of a gray that is akin to the silvery light that permeates the British atmosphere or the ink of a monochrome painting.

My black and white prints of the Cornish tidal zone often did not convey the richness and mystery of the place as well as I would like, so I am presenting most of them here as negative prints. The orignal subject is harder to read, but that does not matter. The negatives focus concentration on the more important things. They accentuate the richness of the scenes' austerity and the indeterminacy of their space and scale. These pictures, as they are presented here, are close to my original intent for the entire project.

All of the images, both positive and negative, have provided the basis for my subsequent work. The Fire in the Shadows portfolio shows a few of my recent negative images. The Occasionally Clear portfolio, which is about Cornwall, includes color pictures taken with a small digital camera twenty-five years after my first photographic expedition to Britain. The images of the tidal zone at Trebetherick show the scenery more as it appears to the eye than the negative prints do. In the later work I have lost my fear of coming too close to illustration. The pictures show how a twenty-first century photographer responds to the same landscape as an eighteenth or ninetheenth-century artist. I hope to return to do more black and white work on film.

Steve Tatum