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Reflections on the Grand Tour

June 11, 2016 by Glyn Leave a Comment

It’s just over two weeks since I returned from my 3-day Grand Tour, travelling mainly by train on a round trip which began and ended in Coventry and visited the south west of England and the north east of Scotland. Since then it’s been a busy period – I’ve been abroad for a conference and have quite a lot of work to complete arising from that – but I have spent time reflecting on the Tour (if very little time yet reviewing the photographs that were taken). My thoughts fall into three categories: practicality, photographic and experiential.

Practicality

I spent a lot of time planning the Tour and believed that it would work well. And in practice everything generally did. With one exception the trains were on time (the Inverness to Aberdeen train was 45 minutes late). The total distance was 1,977 miles which took almost exactly 70 hours to cover. Whilst at first glance this appears impressive, it does mean my average speed was only just over 28 mph! The breakdown of the time spent travelling, awaiting connections and other activities is shown in the pie diagram.

I did ponder staying overnight in Kyle of Lochalsh, which would have had the benefit of travelling in daylight for the entirety of the journey to Aberdeen. It would also, of course, have added on a whole day and increased the cost. On balance I would stick with the way I did it; for some reason, I gain more satisfaction from completing the journey in 72 hours than I would if it had taken 96.

One option I considered was, upon arrival in Penzance, to catch the sleeper train to London. This would have got me back to Coventry five hours earlier the next day. But there is only half an hour between the train from Aberdeen arriving and the sleeper departing, which I decided was cutting it a bit fine. Moreover, I’d never visited Penzance and wanted to see a least a little of it before I departed.

Photographic

The main purpose of the Tour was not photographic. Having said that, I took a lot of photographs – over 700. The approach was very different from my usual one. Normally, my method is very measured; I use a tripod, make use of the camera histogram to help determine exposure and will wait for the right light before I take the picture. On the Tour, pictures were taken from a moving train and any artistic merit they have is due as much to serendipity as to my skill. And without previsualising the finished image as I’m taking the picture, I am finding the editing challenging; whether an image should be high key or low key is generally obvious to me as I seek to reproduce the emotional response that I felt as I took the picture, but that context is absent from the Tour photographs.

Many of the pictures also suffer from artefacts created by reflections from inside the train (hence, in part, the title of this blog). I’m not sure why these cause me concern; after all, I’m not making any secret of the fact that they were taken on a train and reflections are practically unavoidable. But they do. Overall, it does seem a long way from my photographic aspirations.

But I do like some of the photographs. The speed blur of the foreground against a sharp background often works well. The reflections can on occasion be interesting in themselves, as in the featured photograph for this blog. In the next week or two, I’ll publish a selection here and you can reach a view yourself.

Experiential

In the end, did I enjoy the Grand Tour experience? The answer is definitely yes. Sitting for many hours on a train, alternating between looking at the scenery and reading may not be for everybody but for me it was everything I hoped it would be. I find watching the world go by with no personal effort required tremendously relaxing. And some of that scenery is world class; the coastal scenery in both Scotland and Devon, the Highland mountains, even some of the industrial landscapes of the Midlands are hugely impressive, no doubt helped by the generally good weather I enjoyed.

Would I do it again? No, once was enough. But there are other, equally interesting rail journeys that I might take one day…

The Grand Tour – End of First Day

May 24, 2016 by Glyn Leave a Comment

The Grand Tour is living up to all my expectations. A reminder – in 72 hours, I am travelling mainly by train from my home in Coventry to Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland (via London, Fort William and Kyle of Lochalsh), then on to Penzance in Cornwall before returning to Coventry. The total distance is almost 2,000 miles (3,200 km). I explained my rationale, such that it is, in my first blog about the Tour.

This morning I awoke as the sleeper train from London to Fort William was passing the Arrochar Alps, which lie at the southern edge of the Scottish Highlands. My initial encounter with the Highlands was with my best friend in our mid-teens on our first parent-free holiday. It was also the place that my wife and I came to on the first holiday after our marriage – a last minute, super bargain as we hadn’t thought we could afford any holiday that year. Perhaps for these reasons, of all the places I’ve visited the Highlands is undoubtedly my favourite.

So it was an enormous pleasure today as I zigzagged through the region, first west then north then back east. Some of the places I know well, others much less so; much of Rannoch Moor can only be reached by train or on foot and some of the coves that the train skirts as it leaves Kyle of Lochalsh are inaccessible by any other means. I love photographing in this part of the world as I find it so easy to find subjects that resonate with me in the manner I tried to explain in my first blog. Usually, though, I’m using a 35mm reflex camera on a tripod, each picture carefully composed. Today, I’ve been photographing with a compact camera from moving trains; composition has been as much a matter of luck as judgement. At the moment I’m by no means convinced that the experiment is working as well as I’d hoped but I’ll reserve final judgement until I return home and get to properly review the results.

The last leg of today’s journey – Inverness to Aberdeen – is another line I have never travelled on before. It remains, though, almost as unknown as previously; we were late leaving Inverness and pretty well the entire journey took place at night. Still, despite that meaning that my sleep is going to be shorter than I’d hoped, I remain excited by the prospect of tomorrow and the core journey of my Grand Tour, Aberdeen to Penzance. Oversleeping is definitely not an option!

The Grand Tour Begins

May 23, 2016 by Glyn Leave a Comment

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Grand Tour was a rite of passage for wealthy young British men and latterly, with improving transport links, women. Lasting two years or more, a traveller might have lengthy stays in Paris, Geneva, Florence, Venice, Rome, Vienna and Munich. With sufficient time and money I would find it fascinating to make such a tour myself, but unfortunately I lack both.

I really enjoy travelling by train. I think that stems from my childhood when a train journey signalled something out of the ordinary – the start of a holiday or a visit to grandparents. A few years ago I happened upon the longest scheduled train journey in Britain; one direct service a day from Aberdeen in the north-east of Scotland to Penzance in Cornwall, a distance approaching 800 miles (1,300 kilometres).

Over time, the idea grew that it ought to be possible to combine the concept of a Grand Tour with taking that train journey; after all, I have to get to Aberdeen to catch the train. Why not link together some iconic UK train journeys into a Grand Tour, albeit one that takes somewhat less than two years?

Today, the trip starts. In half an hour I leave Coventry for London. From London, I catch the overnight sleeper to Fort William. I then take a bus to Kyle of Lochalsh from where I head by train (travelling over the bit of line shown in the featured image) to Aberdeen, changing at Inverness. The following day is spent on the journey to Penzance, and after an overnight stop there I head back to Coventry. A 72-hour Grand Tour of England and Scotland!

I will of course be taking photographs on the journey. Whilst the editing must wait until I return, I intend to write a daily blog and will attach a featured image to each. I will also be tweeting about my progress (@glynephoto).

The adventure begins!

Ambition and approach

May 21, 2016 by Glyn 4 Comments

Introduction

Half a lifetime ago I was very keen photographer. I studied it at night school for many years. I built a darkroom and loved printing my own black and white images. Then the career took off, the family grew, we moved house – and the photography went on the back burner. Over the next thirty years I dabbled occasionally but never found the time to build a portfolio or to work on specific projects.

Now I have the time: the old career is at an end; the children have long left home. I have the opportunity to pick up where I left off.

Much has changed, of course. What was then an almost entirely analogue world – film, paper, chemicals, darkrooms – is now almost entirely digital. Whilst I could still do photography the way I did then (well, not quite – the film I used is no longer available), I have decided that there is no real benefit in this for my photography and that there would be many unnecessary challenges, for example establishing a darkroom. I’m therefore transitioning to an entirely digital approach, a topic I will return to in future blogs.

But whilst much has changed, the essence of photography – the freezing of a moment in time – has not.

My ambition

My ambition – or, perhaps better, my aspiration – is to produce “fine art” photographs. But what does that mean?

Photography is an unusual artistic medium in that almost everyone can, and most do, take pictures. This has been true throughout my lifetime, though when I was a child photographs were mainly taken on special occasions and holidays. Today, pictures are ubiquitous – at the end of 2015, 6 billion photographs had been uploaded to Flickr and these were increasing at the rate of 2 million per day. Few would argue, however, that each and every one of these is a work of art.

So what turns a “snap” into an artistic statement? I think it comes down to two things, aim and aptitude. Is it the photographer’s intent to produce a work of art? And do they have the ability to turn that intent into reality? In my case, the answer to the first question is very definitely affirmative. (Though not in every picture – I still take family snaps which are about assisting future recollection or capturing celebration, not art.) The answer to the second is quite probably “not yet” – I still have much to learn. However, I am encouraged by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s observation that

Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

My approach

The Steerage, Alfred Stieglitz — The Steerage. Alfred Stieglitz [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

When I was a part-time photography student, one aspect of study was the history of photography. I recall the positive impact on me of the work of the early twentieth century American modernists – Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, amongst others – when I first came across it.

Modernism – at least in photography – was concerned with attempting to express the fundamental realities or universal truths that lay behind superficial appearance. As Stieglitz put it

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

It is in this tradition that I place myself (though I reiterate that at present this is more about aim than aptitude). Having said that, I was brought up in a postmodern world. Postmodernism denies the existence of any universal truth or objective reality – all experience is subjective – and it has had a significant influence on my perspective on the world. How, then, do I square the circle of aspiring to be a photographer in the modernist tradition with having a postmodernist bent?

I make no claims whatsoever to being a philosopher, so I suspect my answer is something of a fudge. When I make a photograph, I am producing something that in a deep sense “speaks to me”; it resonates with my view of myself and how I relate to the world. If you will excuse the contradiction, it is a universal truth if only to me. I have no way of knowing whether it speaks to others in the same way; whilst the modernist in me hopes that it will, the postmodernist thinks that it doesn’t really matter. Indeed, my photographs may not speak to anyone else at all, though obviously I hope they do!

My modernist approach profoundly influences two other aspects of my photography. First, I work mainly in black and white; quite simply, it is easier for me to produce a fine art photograph in monochrome than it is in colour. That may change in the future, of course. Second, my work tends to be project based, either geographic or thematic as, for me, the impact of a set of complementary photographs is greater than series of unconnected images. The first photographs I have included in the site portfolio (from Budapest) will ultimately form part of a larger project on European cityscapes and I am working on three other projects. This project-based approach does not preclude curating new thematic projects from existing work; indeed, I think that is very likely at some point in order to refresh my own experience of the work. It also aligns with my own consumption of others’ photographic work; I much prefer to view their images in monographs or exhibitions.

The primary purpose of this site is images, not words. I hope you enjoy my photographs and return from time to time to see how my aptitude is developing. And to judge whether my ambition is closer to being realised.