Santa Fe,  New Mexico, in the United States of America.

A trip that I had been looking forward to for many months; to Santa Fe Workshops, a photography centre with high calibre tutoring. The home of Georgia O'Keefe.

Part of me felt ambivalent about travelling to the US given recent worldwide events, but the other part of me really wanted to go; I was excited by the course aims and the work of its tutor Anna Rotty. The course was entitled 'Landscape as Collaborator'. 

A bit of a pretentious title perhaps? Not, it became clear, for those who truly respect the land and also the people who have inhabited it for hundreds of years before white settlers arrived. I had a lot to learn. 

So what is a collaboration? I was happiest with a definition that involved participants working together to achieve something greater that that which any individual participant could achieve if working alone. Without the effect that the landscape has on my psyche my photography would not exist.

I didn't want to get too heavy and philosophical about the title, being more interested to experiment with new techniques. Often my 'why' of making images comes much later. It  becomes clearer with time whether a deeper meaning is emerging. I am happy to let weeks pass and see what transpires. I was there to have fun.  And I did.

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Our group arrived with a few images from home already printed out, but quickly started making new images in the bright, almost desert, high altitude landscape.

It was refreshing to trek out into the garden with minimal equipment and to start photographing just a few yards from the centre. I have long given up photo workshops where you travel many miles in a bus to a chosen location, all jump out of the bus, line up your tripods and take the 'classic shot'. Not for me. Especially not waterfalls in Iceland or red boats sailing in front of icebergs in Greenland! I prefer the closer details and the colours of the terrain. I don't like having my photographic subject matter chosen for me.

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We started off making viewfinders for looking at the landscape. This rapidly moved to taking pictures through the viewfinder. Fragments of sky, bush, tree, soil. Isolating objects. I have done something similar before with litter, but enjoyed the blue sky and the cotton wood trees.

We printed images in the digital lab and went outside again to try new juxtapositions. Finding shadows and creating shadows became a happy game.

It was Anna Rotty's waterfall of light on water 'Paradise Waterfall'  that drew me in to applying for this course.

I  was excited at the idea of creating sculptures with photographs, and the idea that I don't have to frame my work in order to display it. This is good for both my pocket and the environment, and fits with my recent sculptural book making experiments, 

We found a beautiful sun lit stream to work with.

​A happy place......

​The bright sunlight created wonderful ripples on the water. 

As the days progressed I became more interested in repeated rephotographing of images in different locations. Lush vegetation on dry soil. Water on parched soil. I started thinking about location, transportation and the presence or absence of water. 

The rain drenched lupins below are rephotographed in Abiquiu, Santa Fe and Vancouver. A record of my recent trip and also a previous trip to Alaska where the lupins resided. 

I worked with shadows and my own body. Placing myself into the landscape without showing my face. Immersing photos in the stream and watching them gain strength as they dried. 

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As a stranger in Santa Fe I didn't have an obvious way to connect with the landscape., except as a stranger.  But by demonstrating my presence there I began to feel connected in the way that I usually do when walking and exploring natural spaces. 

I don't really know yet what I am trying to say other than;

'I am in this place. I give you the the evidence. This is landscape.'

See; I can be really pretentious if I try.......

Also emerging are themes  about changes with passing time, travel/transportation and  different climates.

Now that I am back home on the beach at Camber Sands I will continue exploring possibilities and playing with ideas until I really know what I wish to say.

I have all summer to think about it. 

​Thank you Anna!

 
So the new knee is now 6 weeks old, and beginning to be used for its true purpose. My other half (OH) is patiently waiting for permission to walk more than a few minutes a day.

It is a slow game, with many anxieties along the way. The days merge into a routine of exercises, physiotherapy, resting and icing. Meanwhile I have been doing more household tasks than usual. as OH is normally very good at shopping and cooking, and the grass has started growing.

Today we managed a short trip to London, by train, to hear the artist Beatrice Forshall speak at Eames Fine Art Studio.

Beatrice has been passionate about animal conservation since her childhood in rural France. As a child she made papier mache models of endangered species to raise money for the WWF. After studying illustration at Falmouth she now specialises in drypoint etchings of endangered species, whether large mammals or tiny insects. She is an eloquent and inspiring speaker.

Did you know that the dung beetle is endangered because it navigates by the Milky Way, and light pollution is interfering with its ability to roll its balls of dung in a straight line to where it needs to go?

Or that there are only 10 asiatic cheetahs reamining in the world, all in Iran?

Sobering facts.

Which got me thinking about the point of art. Does it need to have a message?

As I struggle to get back into writing and to find a focus for my photographic work I  frequently comtemplate this question.

Having also, like Beatrice, made art about man's impact on our planet, I now find myself experimenting endlessly as the only way forward after exhausting my personal well of enthusiasm for making work about litter and pollution.

And my answer is a resounding 'NO'!

Art is primarily for the benefit of its creator. A way of expressing oneself in ways other than speech can allow.

I like to think of my art self as my alter ego.

Free to act in ways that my past self did not feel able.

To dance in the sunshine.

To play.

To try new things. 

And it is in this frame of mind that I prepare for a trip to Santa Fe photographic centre, to work with the desert landscape in new ways under the supervision of Anna Rotty.

Desert landscapes have always excited me. Almost as much as mountains and forests. The vast expanses of sky and wide vistas. A feeling of freedom that I do not feel in a forest.

A feeling of insignificance on this vast planet. of awe for the plants and creatures that live in these inhospitable places.

I don't yet know how I will respond to the landscape of New Mexico, but I am looking forward to finding new ways to express my feelings about future  places that I visit.

The workshop will involve making new photographs in the landscape and then printing them and incorporating them back into the landscape as new imagined landscapes.

I am struck by the similar ways that I have captured these two deserts (shown above and below) on different continents with their islands of vegetation on very different soils. I hope to come back from this workshop with something completely different. Perhaps it will say something about the connections between deserts around the world. Perhaps it will better express how being in these environments makes me feel.

Georgia O'Keeffe had her home near Santa Fe. Here she is pictured with her cat.

I like to think that I will be as inspired by her locality as she was.

O'Keeffe said 'I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at – not copy it.'

Her drawing below shows the landscape that I will be visiting soon.

The drawing inspired me to write some words as I remembered previous trips to desert landcapes.

Just passing through


Abiquiu.
Scrub spotted dusty desert hills. 
Land of the Tewa people.
Abiquiu means ‘wild chokecherry place’. 
I know not the people, the fruit
or the place.

I  am reminded of another desert,
a different continent. 

The blinding white of las Salinas Grandes;
a sea of caking salt beneath an intense cloudless sky.
Surfaces indeterminate, crusting, inhospitable.

We drowned in the overwhelming silence of this limitless landscape
where infrequent adventurers pass through from distant hills to unspecified destinations.

Bleached dunes and exotic formations carved by the wind. 
Giant blocks of pumice.
Soft curves and sharp edges carved and drawn as if from another galaxy.

A perfect cone arising from the plain where once magma spewed. 
Gritty boulders all that remain.
 Drawing us closer. 
Hypnotic.

Later, rolling rusty hills brushed with soft yellow grasses and the occasional cluster of slender legged inquisitive vicuna. 
Watching us as we did them.  

The heat: dry and unforgiving.
Desiccating skin and soil alike.

In that place I felt wonder
as we too 
passed through.

Below, in Georgia's more typical style, is her abstraction of a stream, as if seen from above.

Expressing one's feelings and learning more about oneself seem to me to be the best reasons to make art.

'If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint,' said the painter Edward Hopper.

'
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.' – wrote poet and artist Thomas Merton.

I came across this video of Ian McKellen talking passsionately about why we should all make art.

Any sort of art. With or without an obvious message behind it. it doesn't matter.

His words resonate deeply. He advises his audience to 'practice art to make your soul grow'.

I will be heading to the desert for that very reason. 

What about you?