Into Tomorrow

Introduction to the withdrawn 2016-17 project INNERSOUND.

 

Part One, LAST MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN, tracks a protracted period where Stewart lost his Father to Alzheimer’s disease. The images are all made in the Highlands of Scotland; memories and specific locations become a trigger for the photographer to examine the relationship with his father, his decline and death. This is a fairly blunt summary of the pictures - but there is a tenderness too to this section. We lose our bearings in the mistlands of snow capped mountain tops but the pictures then fill with bright, colourful northern skies, and we seem to cross a river, towards the setting sun.

Part Two, THE STORM is suddenly and unexpectedly violent. Chaos. We are hammered, pounded repeatedly by the elements. A maelstrom of wind, snow, sea and wild spray - the raw power of the winter ocean – and find ourselves adrift in a terrible storm, all control gone, at the mercy of some greater force. Then, just as suddenly, the storm subsides, and some form of new order and clarity returns to the landscape.

“There's something original and ambitious at work here; a shard-like hard-cutting between image and place and text. Sometimes it's bewildering -- but then that's true of the places Stewart is fascinated by as well. There's a winter-chill to the mountain photographs, and a storm-ferocity to the seascapes, that's born of somewhere between muteness and confusion.” [1]

If the narrative sounds insular, it’s not. As ever with Stewart's pictures, the intention would appear to be a desire to seek out universal subject matter - sky, sea, mountains - to lure the viewer to familiar, safe shorelines - only to then draw them out into the depths of darker, more turbulent psychological territory. 

Stewart has said that the death of his father in 2013 caused a re-evaluation of his relationship with his own children, in this project Part One clearly reads as Father/Son then so in turn Part Two, THE STORM, is Son/Father; and concludes with a most unexpected regeneration. 

 “In 2016 I had deliberately set out to photograph winter storms in the North West Highlands of Scotland. What could not be foreseen was that totally unbeknown to me at the exact time I was photographing the winter storms, my son was learning for the first time of the imminent birth of his own son, Solo.” [2]

It is not always essential to know such a level of personal detail - but somewhere in the midst of all this, Stewart’s Mother suffered a stroke, briefly and terrifyingly losing the power of coherent speech. Knowledge of this does inevitably affect and inform our reading of the images in this second section.

Closing with the birth of new life, this hidden narrative of Part Two book-ends the series with a most unexpected symmetry. We are confronted with a journey where we are lost from the start; moving through through a natural world of sun, light and water, touching both the beginning and end of life - but in reverse order. And inbetween, some kind of violent, silent chaos fights itself out to a peace of sorts, with a deep sense of both seen and unseen forces at work. The voyage is beautiful and terrifying in equal measure, both gentle and cruel, and as Robert MacFarlane notes, for the viewer, this can be bewildering at times. The series ends as it began, at the summit of a snow-dusted Highland mountain – though this time not submerging into the mist - but rather we journey outwards, into tomorrow. 

---

[1] Robert MacFarlane, correspondence on INNERSOUND 29/08/17

[2]  Iain Stewart, correspondence on INNERSOUND September 2017

Last Man

Last Man 

In the unit, there had been good days and there had been days that were not good. I never saw the bad days, he was so sweet and gentle when I visited, in a way I hadn’t remembered him for a long time, and it took me back to when I was a boy and he played with me. So special because they hadn’t happened often. He’d taken to one of the nurses in particular, of course. I believe he thought he was the ward doctor and he was there to administer to the folk around him. The poor confused old folk, he whispered. Some of them don’t even know where they are. The unit door was secured of course, and often as you buzzed to get in, someone would be waiting, hopeful on the other side, enough clarity to try to seize the moment to make a last bid for freedom but never with quite enough conviction or pace to get past you. That would really tug at the heart. He never asked me to take him home. Thank god.

-

Heart racing, stumbling and scuffing over the rough stony path. The path was good here but the light was starting to go. Sun slipping away. Regardless, I stopped from time to time to note down thoughts for reference later. Reading them back later, they made no sense. Half sense. Haikus and nonsense. But my mind was whizzing, my feet were racing and I had no clue why. Racing, chasing. What exactly I was chasing was unclear at this point. A thought process? The daylight, the sunset? A daydream – more likely. That white strip of sand in my sights, still. Surely only a couple more miles. I had been thrashing my way towards it for over an hour, though it hadn’t got me any closer. Mind playing tricks, my notes say ’mirage’. A mirror. 

It was a couple of months now since my Father had passed away. The troubles and upheavals that his final few years had stirred were all still swirling around the family. Some things had got better since, some things had got worse. There was upset, still, and that upset tinged the sense of relief that we had all felt, secretly or publicly. Just how long he had been slowly slipping away was only now dawning. Years. Perhaps ten years. Maybe more. When I stopped in my day to think about him properly, I felt a jolt of guilt for not noticing. But the process had been so gradual. He faded, got quieter, and smaller. Eventually he would barely surface at all, it was a silent mist that he hid in.

-

When he did finally slip away, there were a sudden rush of practical details to be busy with, a moment to take charge, feel some control return, and draw lines, sign papers, close accounts. Then beyond, after – nothing. A drift, a gap where the person once was. It was at some point in this drift I took myself off to a remote corner of Wester Ross, with no real timetable, just me, a tent, a camera, the standard escape plan. I had walked to this bothy before, I had slept there a couple of times, alone, spooked the first time by a scribbled note to ‘beware a man calling himself Jim’, visiting bothies to steal and get up to wickedness. I remember I had wedged the attic door with my tripod and slept fitfully that night, an axe beside my sleeping bag. Morning came with no badness in the night and I had felt foolish. Sure enough though, there was a presence in the bothy, I didn’t feel it for sure until I made pictures in the morning, but there was something there alright. The pictures became an Elegy For a Deserted Croft.

So, now, two or three years later, was this somehow a timeslip of the same presence that I found myself chasing? Walking on from the bothy at Erradale to the tantalising white beach that was just at the edge of my vision, I was chasing. Chasing what? Time? Not a soul to see or speak to the whole walk out but I was following something sure enough. Then – a small movement up ahead - did I see a head bob on the path? I tried to speed up, clumping in big boots with the ridiculous oversized rucksack. Cameras, bedrolls, film, waterbottles – I was weighed down and tiring. When the path faded and I lost it I would pick up a sheep track through the heather or just head for the edge of the coastline and pick out a new line. No need for a map, follow your nose. It was familiar though I knew I’d never walked this way. Half-track, part remembered…

-

Dementia, Alzheimer’s – speak the words. There’s no shame, it will come to so many of us. One in six, at the minute. And counting. It will very likely touch you, your family, reader. Seep quietly into your life with no big alarm bells or fanfare. Like me, you may not realise for years – just that the person you love is a bit quieter, not joining in. It’s maybe just an off day – for sure enough they’re a little bit more themselves the next day. It took years to realise what had been stolen. There’s a pang of pain, of realisation and some anger mixed with the guilt. The person is still there, but shrunk down inside. When did that happen? Why did no-one notice? Why did I not notice…

What I was chasing on that path was the past. I didn’t know it but that beach was a beach we had visited and loved on one of our many family holidays to the North West Highlands in the 1970’s. Redpoint. We had just called the beaches Redpoint One and Redpoint Two. Visiting from further north, by road, we parked up and walked south. Now, some thirty years later, I had started south and was walking north – without recognising and without realising, I was walking back to the past, to my childhood. Exhausted, I slumped onto the grass at the edge of the beach. The early autumn sun shifted and filtered through the low cloud then spilled golden and warm onto the pebbled beach. My heart felt so much peace. A wave of acceptance. I was here. He was here too, with me, in this place.

Wandering Aengus

 

 The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire a-flame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And someone called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done,

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

WB Yeats

The View From Here

Now Showing

 

The View from Here | Landscape Photography from the National Galleries of Scotland

at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery

October 30th - April 30th 2017 

 

Eriboll  2009

SSHoP Interview

Studies In Photography 2016 : 30th Anniversary Edition

The Scottish Society for the History of Photography

In conversation with James Lawson

J.L. Looking back to our conversation in 1996, I see we were attempting to establish something of a narrative of your development as a photographer.  You had first been drawn to documentary photography.  You’d then found it a means of addressing more personal experience and intimate feeling.  At last, you’d arrived at what we could perhaps call and extraverted view upon the elemental and sublime in nature. Do I recall rightly? And where would you say you are as a photographic artist now? 

I.S. You do recall rightly. My first love was documentary photography and story-telling. That first love has never left. I no longer make ‘documentary essays’ these days but I still love telling stories. It’s just that the narratives are more subtle.
I have continued down the path of landscape photography - for want of a better category to the place the work in. The trigger is within - but the subject matter I choose is outside. Usually the further away I can get from myself, the better.
‘Extraverted’ is a great word. You’ve got me nailed already. I’m not reading it in the familiar sense of wanting to dominate a space – that could not really be any further from the truth. I’m by nature that quiet person who prefers to be in the shadows of the room, or indeed preferably not in the room at all. I guess that probably comes through in my pictures. Instead I read ‘extravert‘ to mean drawing from inside and obtaining gratification from that which is outside.
The most literal example of this might be my ‘Bothy’ series from 2009. I was returning to the landscape after a really bleak period and this series represented a half-way house. Not fully immersed, this was a tentative slight return. It was a period where I actually wondered if I might give up photography. I saw nature again through the window and inevitably I was drawn back outside. I’d say that process of re-integration continues still, many of my relationships changed and my priorities changed irrevocably. As ever, the work begins with simply wanting to make pictures, but at some point with photography there is a requirement to draw attention or the work never gets seen and is a self-indulgence. During my journey through photography I have wrestled at times with this Extravert/Introvert contradiction. I think Carl Jung would have a field day with me.

J.L.  You had not long finished your Masters at ECA when we spoke.  I’m struck by what seems to have been an insistence by you and your teachers on artistic purpose as opposed to vocational considerations.  But now I look at your (wonderful) website.  And I see that work is presented under two headings –Fine Art and Commercial. There’s not much in the latter category.  Am I to denounce the witlessness of commissioning executives, or register your disdain of such work? How wide would you say is the divide between those categories? 

I.S. I’m a jobbing photographer – I do have to promote myself. Although I have always loved Duane Michals’ description of his commercial practice as ‘cottage industry’. I work hard as a commercial photographer, I always did juggle that with my teaching and gallery projects. The designer who very kindly helped me put my website together saw clear separation between these two key areas of my work – but also saw a balance in the relationship and I think that was very perceptive.
I do think I qualified in photography at quite a unique time. Late 1980’s/early 1990’s coincided with a tremendous rise in appreciation of photography as an art form and simultaneously as a powerful voice in the press – with enlightened editors like Colin Jacobson at The Independent and Ally Palmer in the Scottish media. I was incredibly fortunate to walk straight into a career as a working photographer and be granted the space to learn and develop on the job so to speak. And you’re right that the emphasis at Art College had been form and content – technique was administered as and when needed. We were privileged in the sense that we were encouraged to think and look and express ourselves rather than tick the box and complete the next module. This approach I do believe was hugely beneficial to creative growth. And not at all self-indulgent – after all, we did all have to sink or swim after Art School, so it was not wise to leave without having asked a few pertinent technical questions. Resourcefulness and resilience are of course also essential ingredients, as with anybody working in the creative sector.  
As far as a divide, I have always run simultaneous careers in Commercial Photography and gallery/Fine Art work, though of course in the early days the first subsidised the second. I’ve never prevented the two from meeting creatively, but they seldom do collide. I’m still predominantly known as ‘people’ photographer for commercial projects – and I love that. It makes the line even clearer in my head. I don’t feel in any way whatsoever that one area is of less value than the other - photography has put food on the table for nearly 30 years. I never for one minute take for granted how fortunate I am to have survived doing what I do – whether it’s someone wanting to buy a print or ask me to photograph their business.

Do you have thoughts on art-education today –in regard to the teaching / in regard to the learning?

I.S. Just that I was very lucky to have worked in teaching when I did, for the best part of twenty years during some golden years. I worked with many wonderful people and it’s a delight to meet them now and see their careers progress. I’m talking about the students not the staff! For the last few years I was involved in teaching, morale amongst staff was very low and it’s sad that still seems to be the case. I could not understand why so many unhappy people were stuck doing something that was clearly making them even more unhappy. The learning experience has, I think changed a lot in the last ten years. More students, less staff. I am disturbed to see that zero hours contracts seem to have crept back. I was quite vocal when I was involved but I’m not really any more. I know through my own family’s experiences that the system isn’t perfect - but also that there is fresh teaching talent coming through.

J.L. I look at your ‘Fine Art’ work.  It’s very varied generically. Have you integrated photographic practices that had been successive in your earlier years?

I.S. It’s not really, Jim. If you look closely, I only really have one tune to play but I’ve occasionally tried picking up a different instrument. I do remember Ian MacDonald writing in Revolution In The Head about John Lennon starting to write on the piano instead of the guitar – because he didn’t know how to play the piano. It was this curiousness/restlessness that originally led to me to work with landscape photography – dabbling in something I knew nothing about. Similarly with video  - recent projects have incorporated video, a field in which I have had no training.

J.L. Are you a different person when you work in different genres?

I.S.  Definitely not. I’m clearly very much a photographer with a video camera! We are easily spotted. I daren’t move off the tripod so I have to let the elements write the script!

 J.L An abiding concern is landscape –or rather its widest elemental panorama of earth, air, water, light and darkness.  The perspective, I see, sometimes bears the traces of human labour –planting and waiting– a monument raised immemorially, and of human transit. But he’s corporeally –and emphatically– absent from the photographic moment. When I, the observer, stand behind you, behind the camera, before the scene, it feels like my encounter. Your action has seemed self-effacing.

I.S. We return to Extravert/Introvert. I’m not comfortable intervening. Or appearing. And the pictures that make it through have as little of me in the equation as possible, so as not to interfere with the experience for the viewer. That’s when a picture works – or has a chance of working. If you manage to hit a universal note. I’m very small – and the things I’m pointing my lens at are very big. I’m recording it, not making sense of it – maybe if I get lucky, someone else will.

J.L.  But then, my general proposition about your work collapses.  I come upon ‘Within.’  And darkness and light appear in a new dialectic. Wonderful again. I’ve got an art-critical and a cultural-critical tick.  It’s to put your work alongside painting, music, poetry that seems to emerge within a similar sensibility and, for ease of understanding, put it into a category. Do you work with a sense of kinship with artists whom you admire? 

I.S. Yes but naturally I’m not looking to place myself beside them. You hope to make something new each time. It’s not always the obvious folk in your own field who make you get up off the seat and feel inspired to create. I’ve just been back a third time to see the British Art Show and the energy, the buzz of ideas and the sense of purpose is incredibly inspiring. Almost all from artists who were previously unfamiliar to me. Some of the video work was superb. I wouldn’t say this will influence my work directly - but I work on my own, and you do need these timely trips to the art gallery to inspire and remind you that you do not work in a vacuum. If you keep it in check, the internet can inform and inspire too. Some photographers spend way too much time on there promoting themselves, but if you are choosy there is great stuff tucked away to inspire and educate you. I do feel like I should really be paying Alec Finlay through some kind of Social Media paywall for the benefits of what he dispenses online for free!

J.L. The work’s very minimal and very poetical.  I mentioned Turner and Friedrich all those years ago.  I might add John Houston now. Would that make sense? 

I.S. Thank you. Every time I get a painterly comparison it makes me smile. For a long time photography seemed to be the poor relation to painting. I never really recognised the big divisions and happily dipped between the disciplines. I had a couple of new pieces in the RSA recently in a mixed show and overheard a conversation where a couple of people were trying to decide if they were paintings or photographs. Which I take as a huge compliment. So your question is welcome and very flattering. Perhaps the palettes of John Schueler or Gwen John have made more direct connections but your question will make me examine John Houston’s work. Writing, music and film still continue to inspire me enormously. Kathleen Jamie or Robert MacFarlane as much as Bill Viola or Richard Long. And I love Alec Soth’s storytelling, he is a real talent. I hope I’m open to bit of everything. Good art is just good art, isn’t it.

J.L. The work is very immersive.  Do you find music in that land, in these skies? 

I.S. I’m open, my senses are alive when I’m in the landscape. I’m tuned in and concentrating. My vocabulary is visual. Sometimes I write things down but mostly I’m just feeling alive. Occasional shouts or whoops if it all clicks, more often muttering when it doesn’t. I do get music in my head - but that comes before or after. Sometimes physically listening to music abets the creative process – like a warm up. But if I’m making moving images I have to turn all the sound off during and after, and I make silent movies.
It is worth mentioning that I have an ongoing collaborative relationship with a very talented sound artist called Keith Berry. Keith’s sound pieces are more about silence than music – though that does not do him credit. His work completes and compliments mine perfectly. Our relationship is perhaps unusual in that we have worked together now on several projects over the last five or six years but have never met. I realise that this may sound odd – but it is somehow totally perfect. I think we are both aware now that this has gone on for so long that the magic might end were we to meet. I don’t tend to work specifically with Keith’s sound pieces in mind, but on several pieces of work now, they have not felt complete until the two were married. 

J.L. In truth, I can’t put word or category to your work.  But eloquence and clarity and resonance belong to the world in these photographs.  I know my own feelings before them. 

Thank you, Jim

Converge

New work by Iain recently on show in 'Converge' at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh for an exhibition chaired by Visual Arts Scotland. 

These two pieces - erase i and erase iii - are from extended photo/film series Last Man On The Mountain.

erase i

erase iii

work in progress 2015

untitled film still