Neil McCoubrey

What kind of photographer am I?

I have been calling myself a Landscape photographer, but my subjects (or the primary focal points) are not natural. They are always man-made and usually banal, anonymous objects or human traces. My photographs often appear to use the Landscape as a mere backdrop, as a setting that defines a mood and a scale for the object whilst conveying its relative power or vulnerability in that landscape. Is this Landscape photography?

I used to call myself a “Found Still Life” photographer when my attention was on the backrooms and archives of museums and galleries. At that time, the room was the landscape, but the focus was on the objects stored there. Then, as now, my images were designed to reveal the quirky juxtapositions between objects and backgrounds or any unusual interplay of shapes and colours.

My intentions have always been to create enigmatic arrangements and juxtapositions to encourage the viewer to find narratives and look for metaphors. This is similar to the ways 16^th century Dutch Still Life paintings are read but without having the well-established meanings assigned to each object by that genre.

Today my locations have changed. Instead of the small landscape of rooms in buildings I go into sparsely populated landscapes to find my compositions. The land, sea and sky have become my equivalent of the Dutch painters’ dining tables, curtains, and windows but it is Still Life, just the same.

My current objective

A landscape photographer makes both conscious and intuitive decisions when choosing a location, the subject matter, timing, and the final composition of their images. More than just documenting the scene they are attempting to capture and to communicate their own responses to the landscape and conditions, to the viewer. When such decisions are conscious the photographer should be aware of both what they are doing and why.

However, some elements of the decision making will be intuitive or instinctive, resulting from their experiences, their education, culture or maybe just habit. When decisions are driven by intuition, rather than being consciously made, the photographer may not even be able to articulate why the scene justified the making of an image. Perhaps it just felt right but, if so, then why?

The objective of my photography is to understand how the photographer recognises there is an opportunity for making a photograph?