Last year I managed to purchase a Leica Q2 and have been using it in place of my Panasonic largely because of the sharpness it brings to the image. Although I began initially using the camera for photographs of anything that stopped me I soon began to take photographs of the South Pennines.
I was thinking about the Boxing Day floods and I worked out a method that spoke about the rivers and catchment areas through superimposition. I exhibited the photographs at A Space for Photography, Arles, with six other photographers who had trained at the University of Ulster and locally at a Nanholme Open Weekend. This is what I wrote for the Arles publicity:
Upper Calder Catchment Area No 1. Golden Water from Source to River Calder water bodies
This work is part of a series taken in the South Pennines in Yorkshire, where I live, begun before the pandemic. I have used a vintage 1930s Plaubel, a pinhole, and here, a Leica Q2 to describe the immediate environment and my emotional response to it. Now, the photographs hark back to the famous Boxing Day floods that affected the north of England in 2021 and although the environment no longer shows damage, memories continue to impact on minds and behaviours. The volume of water that surged down the valleys was unimaginable. We all believe in climate change now.
Upper Calder Catchment Area No 15. Hebden Water from Widdop Beck to River Calder water bodies
How to describe a process that has taken an era; that becomes invisible through the length of time it has taken? Problems with the climate have only become recognisable in the last few decades but atmospheric change linked to global warming has been known of since the Industrial Revolution. The work buys in to the pictorialism of the early pioneer photographers from that time but it is disrupted alluding to the changes that we can see happening in the environment now.
Upper Calder Catchment Area No 20. River Calder from Walsden Water to Colden Water water bodies
The titles reference catchment data by area although it falls in the Upper Calder region. The landscapes that I make are specific to the area including many of the characteristic features. With superimposition I have chosen to indicate that water flows through all things, even inanimate objects, understandable to those who dwell in a wet climate. There is refraction by photography itself and furthermore by the occluding of lines leading into the depths of the landscape.
The threat of flooding is becoming more frequent.
Upper Calder Catchment Area No 31. River Calder from Walsden Water to Colden Water water bodies