Abstract

This critical commentary reviews and contextualises existing research on
Photographic strategies for visualising the landscape and natural history of
Northern England: the ordinary and the extraordinary. The commentary
examines three major bodies of photographic work that have each been publicly
disseminated as major exhibitions, Sharpe’s Wood (2007) nominated for the Prix
Pictet (Earth) Photography Award (2009), Chasing the Gloaming (2011)
nominated for the Deutsche Börse and Re: Collections (2013). Each case study
has been subject to critical peer and public review and this is evaluated in the
commentary and a comprehensive box of evidential research material is
presented to support the practice-led research submission.
The commentary positions the practice-led enquiry against the overall research
aims and objectives. The research focus has made a significant contribution to
landscape photographic discourse, through experimental and transformational
analogue and digital photographic methodologies (camera and non-camera) in
the visualisation of the hidden and unseen aspects of the landscape and natural
history of the north of England.
The commentary frames and highlights the wide-ranging historical collections
based research across photographic, artistic and science disciplines, and it tracks
their impact on the research trajectory and on my contemporary photographic
practice. Photographic critical thinking (Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes)
supported the theoretical research aims; their ideas provided critical filters for
practice-led experiments with camera and non-camera seeing and the aim of
visualising the hidden through experimental photographic methodologies.
Historical and contemporary nature writing also informed the photographic
research trajectory, specifically with ideas around the locale within a wider
cultural context and ideas around the (lost) meaning of landscape.
The resulting research outputs have culminated in an examination of the wider
cultural value of the ordinary and the local landscape visualised
photographically.