Paul Kenny is an artist who works with the landscape and uses photographic processes to create his work but you'd be hard pushed to know whether to call him a photographer or not. His biggest body of works are constructed still lifes that relate to the sea shore, tidal processes, erosion and time.

Paul has had a joint show, Fragile, at the Chris Beetles gallery over the last month which had a great write up in the London Evening Standard. We didn't get to see the show but we've been wanting to chat with Paul for some time. We started by asking what he's been up to.

Paul I’ve just come back from that London show, Fragile, and there’s nothing much in the diary until next year. I’ll have a bit of time to do some new work. I’m still vaguely toying with the going to Ireland in October. I’m a fellow of the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in County Mayo, Alex Boyd is a fellow as well. I was made a fellow in 2000 and I’ve been out six times so far. It’s just a fabulous place. It’s mainly painters who go; the people who set it up are from Philadelphia and they ran a gallery in New York in the 80s called Dolan Maxwell and they sold up and set the foundation up. I think they’re both of Irish descent so they have four cottages and two shopfronts on the main street behind which hides four studios, an office, a gallery and a print studio. All in a tiny village in West Mayo, when you go, you get a place to live and a place to work and it’s just incredibly relaxed. Most of the people who are made Fellows are American so you kind of get to mix with these diverse group of artists. I work in a very isolated place in an isolated way – I’m not part of any group, I’m not a part of any academic institutions, I’m not day to day linked with these people in my business so its great for me to have the opportunity to enter into some kind of group discourse…..

But also the coastline is just fantastic, it’s west facing Atlantic; There’s nothing between you and the states. It’s on the Gulf Stream so a lot of stuff gets drifted across and I use a lot of that flotsam and jetsam in my work. – Plastic bottles, etc. I found a message in a bottle there which was amazing. It had been put in the sea off Fado island in New Foundland and taken seven years to arrive.

Tim: Did you get in touch with the people who ‘delivered’ it?

Paul I did but they weren’t interested, it was part of a school project. They weren’t that interested but it interested me.

Tim: Do you get the same types of material deposited on your local coastline in Northumberland?

Paul Yeah, yeah. I’m only three miles from the sea so we go two or three times a week. I’ve been going less recently because we’ve got an elderly dog who can’t cope with the pebbles anymore, he just falls over, so we’ve not been going as much. It’s a bit weird going to the beach and leaving the dog at home, it feels very alien. I still go down to gather material, I’ve been using a lot of fisherman’s rope at the moment and bits of net and stuff.

Tim: So what was the basis of the Fragile exhibition?

Paul It was a group show at the Chris Beetles gallery in London in June. I was really proud of my work and I got a fantastic review in the Evening Standard which did no end of good.

Tim: How do you get publicity like that? Is it something the gallery undertakes?

Paul Yes the gallery promote it. I was really glad that Brian Sewell didn’t review it – he hates photography. He was going on recently about the amount of photography in the Royal Academy Summer Show – but this woman called Sue Steward reviewed it who really liked the work and was interested.

Tim: Brian Swell famously dislikes most photographic works. He has a thing about it not having ‘texture’ or ‘surface’

Paul Yes, the hand of the artist. He can’t just see it as a medium and the art is in the way it’s used. He wouldn’t say “I don’t like Charcoal!”

Tim: So for the pieces in the Fragile exhibition – how do you go about creating them? I note you talked about fisherman’s rope in your current work for instance.

Paul Well it comes out of the fact that I’ve almost stopped using a camera. I’ve been doing this for forty years and I slowly, slowly got disillusioned about photography as a medium. It’s a very limited medium when you boil it down and I think you see this when you see people online. People continue to make the same picture over and over again. That’s OK for them if they want to do that but for me it became really boring and easy. You know what a mean? I was mainly making studio pictures of material the beach that I would bring back to the studio and make a kind of still life studio picture around them – and I started to slightly mess with the negative, scratching the negative. I was interested in the plastic bottles I would find on the beach with all of the scratches in them and I thought these scratches were kind of a diary. Some kind of history of the bottle – every single scratch recorded something. And then I thought about each scratch being created by the tide which is created by the moon and the landscape itself is a record of a journey or history. I made a big series called “A Day at the Beach”. You know sometimes in your work you make a huge leap. You do something that you’ve been scared to do for months but you end up doing it and your work takes a big leap.

It’s easy to take pictures of beautiful pebbles or shells or material you collect and I started to think if I’m true to myself about finding beauty in little things then I should use less and less pretty material. So I would walk on the beach and at the end of the walk I would take two handfuls of what was around my feet and put them in a bag and take it home and spread it out to try and make a work out of it. Just to try and prove that I could say the things I wanted to say without using obviously beautiful materials. I mean you look at something like Edward Weston’s nautilus shells, you know, they’re just very, very beautiful objects in themselves.

Tim: They have an intrinsic beauty that is just being recorded

Paul Yeah. And so it came out of that really. And I started to collect seawater and originally I collected the seawater to wet the things I would brought back so that when I would photograph them they would be wet. And then I started to be interested in the seawater itself and thinking, well maybe I can make a picture out of this so I started to dry it on the negatives and I used to put these constructions into an enlarger and print through them to make a black and white print. And slowly, slowly, slowly over a period of ten years now these plates I was making – I used 5x4 inch pieces of glass and I kind of construct these things with seaweed or seawater and then I’d put them in an enlarger and print from them.

But slowly the plates were becoming more beautiful in of themselves and more interesting. So now I decided that I am the camera and I create a negative and now I scan them instead of printing from them.

Tim: So are these scanned or photographed then?

Paul They’re scanned now. But that is a photograph – I’ve come up with a definition that works for me – “A photograph is a repeatable image made using light”. And that works for me.

Tim: And scanners are cameras at the end of the day as well

Paul So they’re basically 5x4 sheets of glass with stuff from the landscape itself adhered to them .

Tim: So is the piece of artwork the photograph or the object?

Paul yes for me it’s the photograph that is the piece of art. A lot of people have said to me that I should actually exhibit the glass plates but the images are drawn first as part of the design and the finished piece for me is the photograph and then I have to construct something to get me to that point.

Tim: So once these are scanned do you do any post processing work to clean them up or adjust the colours/hues in any way?

Paul I don’t tend to do much of that. There’s lots of fluff and grit in the seawater but I tend the leave them in. Sometimes I scan with the lid of the scanner open, sometimes as a negative but mostly I scan with the plate on the scanner bed and the scanner open. And I sometimes light the back of the plate as well so there is light going through the plate and reflected from it.In the computer I do saturate the colour slightly but all of the colours in the seawater, when they scanned, come out those turquoisey blue colours.

Tim: So is this in a way like Andy Goldsworthy’s work being a combination of a real thing and it’s photograph. Where the photograph is often the final work.

Paul I’m a big, big fan of Andy Goldsworthy, in fact he’s a buyer of my work.

Tim: It’s interesting that he plays down his photography as a part of his artwork.

Paul He does indeed. I was invited to spend a day with him once at his studio in Dumfries and we went out and he was working on a piece and he just had his rucksack with a few cameras at the bottom and once he’d done his piece of work he pulled out this camera and he had no lens cap and it was dust on the lens and he makes these photographs. I said to him do you not take more care about them. And he says “no not really – it’s just what I do”

Tim: Is he quite a considered photographer when it comes to creating the picture?

Paul He does but he wasn’t particularly involved with the process. He just pulled out his tripod and – he was using at the time a Fuji 6x17 camera and he just photographed what he made. He obviously knows what he’s after. Just the other day I watched a documentary on You Tube about his work and he was making this piece with ice and he made it so he knew the sun was setting in a certain point and that was part of the picture.

Tim: How do you think your work is developing at the moment?

Paul At the moment my work is going very minimal. I’m kind of paring it down. I’m interested in rust at the moment. I find little pieces of metal. One of my favourite things to find on the beach is can bottoms. Because the bottom is a concave, rigid structure the bottom stays more intact so you quite often find them on their own. If I put those on the glass plate you get a lot of rust – particularly if they are made of iron. So some of the pictures in the show had this rust element. And if I keep dripping seawater on over maybe a month the can rusts and rusts and rusts and leaves a rusty stain on the glass which is very beautiful. I’ve become more interested in the emulsion, the idea that I’m creating a type of emulsion on a piece of glass which is very similar to an old glass plate photograph. Just shadows on the glass really. With the nylon rope, I liked the way it unravelled and naturally fell into the shapes of waves.

Tim: You took a bit of diversion when you were producing the O Hanami project…

Paul That was a very specific project. I took a year out two years ago because of this problem, a problem that has spanned my whole career in that I cannot continue to make the same picture. Once I become stale and I’m making the same picture over and over I get very, very disillusioned and it’s caused me huge problems. I’ve been with five different galleries in London and we all get to this point where I’m making these pictures that they love and they can sell and I don’t like changing or restricting the flow of my work and we part company.

Tim: It’s a common problem with artists and galleries I think.

Paul It is! So I was just jaded. I did a big commission on the Isle of Mull and produced a show for the An Tobar gallery called “Mull Works” which was all sea works and at the end of it I was really happy with the work and really content with where I was. But I started working again after the commission and I was rehashing the same picture. Something happened by chance to force me to use my eye and my techniques to make work about a different landscape…. this was the time we got snowed in a couple of years ago. Where I live is very prone to snow and it was the winter of 2010 and we got snowed in for four weeks – we couldn’t get a car out at all – couldn’t get to a shop. My studio is at the side of the house. It’s very small, a little old barn, and I need to go out the back door and round the corner to get to it. And I couldn’t get round – I was digging my way to the studio and I dug up this old little Hosta leaf from under the snow and I took it into the studio and I just started to flatten it out a look at it and I stuck it to a piece of glass the way I would do with seaweed and it looked really beautiful so I started to try to make these pictures out of just scraps of garden material as the snow melted. I thought, this is interesting – I might just stop doing this sea stuff and just do this project for a year. It was linked in with other things as well. I went to Japan quite a few years ago but I did actually witness this ceremony called O Hanami when the cherry blossom is out and they go into the park and sit under the cherry trees and when the wind blows and they get covered in petals they all applaud and drink. The literal translation of the phrase is “A Celebration of Transient Beauty”.

Tim: What a beautiful concept

Paul Yes! I loved it – I just thought the concept of this celebrating this beautiful little pink petal that’s alive and beautiful for about a day was wonderful. So that was a part of it and I thought I could do this for a whole year because we have things that come out and are very beautiful for a short period in this country so why should it be just Japan. A complete show evolved in my head this whole exhibition that started off with these dead Hosta leaves and went right through the summer through brilliant tulips and explosions of colour and through to winter where it went back to dried leaves. The whole show would start in browns and went through to colours and then back to browns.

Tim: Was it finally hung in the gallery like that?

Paul Yes, yes. The show was just as I imagined it, Chris Beetles did a fantastic job and produced a lovely catalogue, the show was really successful and got me a lot of attention but when it was over it was good to get back to the shoreline.

Tim: Did that journey away refresh your work?

Paul It did indeed. I went back with a fresh eye and different ideas and I thought this work I mde for the Fragile show was really good work and different to what I’d done before and I’ve learned some new things. I don’t know if the gallery liked it because for them it was me jumping about a bit again. They like you to be consistent.

I don’t know how people live with themselves creating the same work all of the time. It’s the same with photographers as well. Some of these people who really promote themselves and are considered quite highly thought of but they revisit the same idea many, many times.

Tim: Going back to photography – how do you think it can be creative?

Paul I don’t know really. I think a lot about these kind of issues. It’s interesting that on the whole galleries don’t like inkjet prints at all. Since I discovered Jack Lowe in Newcastle and once I saw his work and what he can do it completely changed my mind about what a digital print was. I used to pride myself on the fact that my silver gelatin prints were beautiful objects. If you saw one and held one you’d think it was a beautiful thing. And I’d never seen a digital print that had that same feeling until I saw what Jack does and I thought “My god! These things are gems!” and I’ve been working with him for five years and we’ve worked really closely and we’re producing something that I think is unique. It’s a new beauty that wasn’t possible before. So there is still room for creativity in the photographic process.

Tim: What types of photography do you enjoy?

Paul Well I went to see that Landmarks exhibition at Somerset House. The two people I like I suppose are Susan Derges who I love and she uses photography in a creative way and Garry Fabian Miller (ed: See the Camera-less Photography exhibition that ran at the V&A) .

I did see a bit at that exhibition that was really interesting but the prints weren’t made for the environment. A lot of them were far too big. The Susan Derges was covering a whole wall in a room that you could hardly move away from. The Nadav Kander and Simon Norfolk were too large as well.

Tim: We’ve got the Becher’s to thank for that I think – If you can’t make something original, make it bigger

Paul That’s right – that’s what I thought. In all the reviews I saw of the show nobody picked that up. I got really interested in David Maisel’s work which is quite similar to mine in it’s ideas but done from as far away from the earth as you can get. Very poor quality printing. I try and make my prints into these beautiful things that make you salivate when you get near them.

Chris McCaw was very good with the sunburn pictures and I did like some of the scientific images from other sources like NASA and Hubble.

I was massively influenced a while ago by that full moon exhibition at the Haywood by Michael Light. He had access to like 30,000 negatives that were taken on the moon. That was very impressive at the time and a lot my pictures from At the Beach were recreations of pictures like that but using stuff from the earth. I kept on thinking “Why are these pictures so powerful – they’re just pictures of the floor!?”. I should be able to make an equally powerful image with the earth’s floor. I used a lot of raking light across the surface like the moon pictures. There is still an element of that in my work I think.

Tim: Do you always have an intended scale of your final work?

Paul That’s quite an interesting question. I don’t know. That’s one of the things I’ve found liberating about digital image making. I hadn’t worked in colour ever before I started working digitally and I felt liberated but also by the scale. I like printing big because I can do it but it has to be linked in with where this pictures going to be. I don’t like the idea of doing things huge for the sake of it. I tend to work at about 20x24 – a sort of domestic scale.

Tim: How does a typical day at the beach go for you?

Paul Well it’s just a collecting thing these days and a thinking space for me. I don’t ever take a camera – actually I do, I take a Lumix digital as a notebook and I do like playing around with instagram and snapseed as a sort of playful thing. But mainly it’s in the studio. I always have six or seven things on the go at once. Because the stuff takes so much time to dry things you can’t get onto the next stage quickly. Particularly at the moment with the rust work, I’m having to induce things to rust. It’s a process that you can’t hurry – it just happens. So lots on the go at once. I do some drawings as well. I’ve just found a fantastic bit of fertiliser bag on the beach and it’s so creased and battered by the sea that when I scan it it looks like marble because the creases are white and the bag has a bluey tone to it. So I’m cutting up squares of that and working out how I can match it up with some of the other things I’m doing. It tends to be very hands on in the studio – the landscape itself is the inspiration really.

Tim: What do you do when you aren’t working on art.

Paul Nothing! That’s what I do!

Tim: Do you have any other hobbies or listen to music?

Paul Yeah, we’ve got a big garden so we grow a lot of vegetables. Yes I listen to music too, it’s very important for me. I listen to music all of the time when I’m working.

Tim: What sort of music?

Paul A huge variety. I tend to like things that are quite long winded, I’m listening to Philip Glass at the moment, sort of tinkling away in the background. I try and keep up with it though so I’m always trying to find new music. I listen to a lot of John Hopkins at the moment.

Tim: Back to your work again – What happens to the ‘originals’, the ‘negatives’ as it were? Do you recycle them?

Paul Yes they tend to get recycled or thrown away. I keep the occasional ones, they’re very good to take to talks. Some people just can’t get there head around what I do and when I get a plate out with the dried rust and water and string on it it suddenly becomes clear.

Do you know Michael Jackson? I’ve been following his blog quite recently and I’ve emailed him saying he’s being too honest. I don’t think he should be telling people how he did those pictures in the fishtank. I think it somehow detracts from them. They were beautiful and mysterious and now they’re not. It’s something I’ve toyed a lot with, whether I should tell people how I do what I do. I like the idea that people should work it out. I have a friend who has one of my pictures and she keeps it by the telephone and she still phones me up after ten years telling me she’s just found another bit you know or “how did you do this?”. I like the idea that people can do that.

One of the issues with photography at the moment is that there is just too much of it. We’re bombarded by photographic images. You wouldn’t listen to a symphony once and say you understand it. You’d listen to it over and over again until it becomes a part of you and I like the idea that people could look at my work in that kind of way over a long period.

Tim: People do seem to like to show too many pictures. They aren’t particularly great self-editors.

Paul The other thing I find with photographers is that they tend to only look at photography. I think like you, you’ve obviously seen Andy Goldsworthy and know his work but that could inform a landscape photographers work far more than looking at Flickr.

These new pictures that were in the Fragile exhibition were heavily influenced by The Boyle Family. They have this thing where they would go around with a wood worker’s set square and throw it in the air and where it would land would be the bottom left hand corner of their piece and they would recreate that square of the world and then hang it on a wall. They’re wonderful – they blew me away. I saw a couple of them at the Tate in Liverpool, the sand ripples and I thought that’s fantastic. So a lot of newer pictures in the Fragile show have got sand in them.

Tim: Which other artist do you find inspire you

Paul Ooh – Rothko, let’s start with the big ones, erm. One of the artists who influenced me heavily early on was a Yorkshire artist called David Blackburn – he lives in Huddersfield. I was blown away by his work a long, long time ago. About 30 years ago – he does pastel drawings of the moorlands, he calls them visionary landscapes. I was influenced by the fact he was just an ordinary bloke. He owned two terraced houses in Huddersfield – one he lived in and one he worked in – he just toddled between the two, never married, he just worked. He does these panels of about twenty pieces joined together making these huge pieces and when I was at the end of my black and white printing phase I was making these pieces that had 5 or 6 or 8 pictures joined together to try to make a bigger piece out of smaller pieces. In 2007 I had a kind of crisis – I was sponsored by Forte in Hungary, for seven years I didn’t buy a piece of paper, they were fantastic. I got this email one day – we’re closing the factory tomorrow and that’s it. Slowly other bits of changed or stopped being made. They stopped PanF in 5x4 sheets. I came to this point where it was all falling apart and then I was introduced to Jack. I didn’t exhibit for a couple of years while we worked on a digital way of making work.

I’m actually thinking of using film again though, black and white but then had tinting. I’ve been working on some hand tinting of inkjet prints.

Tim: We look forward to seeing that in the future - thank you very much for your time

Paul: It was a pleasure.

You can see more of Paul Kenny's work at his own website www.paul-kenny.co.uk or at the Chris Beetle's gallery website www.chrisbeetlesfinephotographs.com

We have recently seen the release of an inaugural book from large format photographer Dav Thomas - "With Trees" reviewed elsewhere in this issue. Dav is a friend of On Landscape, having written a few articles in the past, and also a friend of the editor, Tim Parkin. Dav mentions that he was cajoled into the book by the twitter community and credits David Breen, his publisher, as being the enabler of the book and Director of Triplekite Publishing.

We had a chat with David Breen and asked him a few questions about the project and future plans. We've included a few pictures from the first print run of Dav's book at the Gutenberg press in Malta.

Where has Triplekite Publishing come from and why was the business created?

Triplekite is a business I started a few years ago when I left my employment with Virgin. It was set up predominantly to deliver corporate development consultancy, which may seem to be a long way from book publishing. I would probably put down the venturing into book publishing to firstly, my collecting of "photo books" and secondly, as a reaction to the quality of some of the things I was buying. And probably in true Virgin style I had a moment when I thought to myself, I should just publish books then. That way I can diversify my business attentions a little and bring into reality the kinds of books I most enjoy at the quality I want them. Triplekite Publishing is therefore a fledgling business which is planned to sit alongside my core business.

Was there a catalyst which led you to this business model?

As with all these things it is often rarely one divining moment in time, however ordering 3 titles at the same time from the most famous digital, on demand, book site, certainly had a part in it. I was also having a number of book related conversations which all pointed to the scarcity of funding for landscape biased, photo titles. I can still recall the evening on twitter when I was casually watching Dav being berated, cajoled and brow beaten into a corner, as to whether he would produce a book or not. At some stage during it, I fired him a DM asking if it was something he had researched previously. At the time I thought that it would be an interesting intellectual exercise to do, which may lead to bringing a book into reality. On reflection it now seems an idealistic and beautifully naive thing to think, but we do indeed have a title, and it is currently in the British Library and that feels pretty good.

Along the way Dav & I have been discussing future projects and now have a loose but workable model for future titles.

What does Triplekite Publishing stand for and what is the goal?

The one word which springs to mind is quality, but its more than that, quality in the print process of course, but also in the design of every aspect. So we strive to create something which has great parts, but also collectively sits well as a total package. Its often too easy to accept the status quo as being the way things are done, to me that seems lazy, and if that was the case I probably wouldn't bother. The box is possibly the best example of my thinking, buy a book from anywhere in the world and 99% of them will arrive in a similar package which you will open, and without thought dispose of, hopefully into the recycling bin. I wanted to create packaging which would ask a question, do i throw this out, is this part of the product, do I keep it… has it worked? To do that does, of course, create some extra work, and we can improve I am sure.

The other thing we stand for really strongly is non-compromise in decisions, based on profit reasons. Now I am not suggesting we are an altruistic organisation, we do need to make profit, but we don't bow to short termism. With "With Trees" we could have produced a lovely book with equally good print quality for approx. 20% less cost if we had made it 3cm smaller. We dismissed it within a very short phone call, it would have still been nice, but just not as good. If any real publishers ever read this they will probably think I am some kind of loony, but maybe I am just blessed with ignorance in the status quo of publishing.

At the minute my goal for the future is to produce 2 or 3 titles per year with a leaning towards landscape photography in genre. Each book will be of a quality, or style, which is recognised as a high end "photo book". I am not saying that we won't move into more mainstream book production of instructional photo titles or similar at some stage.

How do you differ from a more traditional and established publishing house?

I am not too sure I can answer that in any level of detail as I don't know that much about the establishment. The biggest difference probably, is that we are not in the same business as them really, they publish titles which need to support multiple departments and that comes with proper plans and financial risk equations, production schedules and all that good stuff.

We are more of a facilitator of great book production, a collective approach, with a big difference in that we are prepared to put up the financial risk associated, we bet on our instinct. We handle everything from the choosing of artists to support, financing, design, retail and distribution. We have growth plans for sure, but we will never be a Taschen, at least I don't have it in a plan as yet.

Why would a photographer choose Triplekite Publishing over any other publisher?

As above I am not sure that they would. If an artist wanted a traditional, mainstream, mass distribution publisher, then they wouldn't choose Triplekite Publishing. If however they want a high quality, total package, beautifully presented, and made, book, then I think we may just be worth speaking to. They need to want to be involved closely, as our model is as much about the artist as it is about the product.

How did "With Trees" come about and what was it in Dav, that made you believe it would be a great book.

With Trees started as a twitter chat between many people, which resulted in Dav and I meeting in a hotel bar in Manchester. I had met him once before briefly in Surprise View area near Hathersage, and he had given me some great advice in my own film photography. During that short meeting in the bar we chatted and both pulled out numerous books we respected, debating them we seemed to have a lot of common ground in what we liked and wanted to do. The commercial conversation was very brief and at some point we agreed that we should try and do it, a shake of hands later and “With Trees” was conceived.

I tend to make decisions quickly and hold a lot of faith in the relationships that you hold within business. In Dav I saw many qualities I admired and none that felt like it would cause a problem during the project.

How long did the project take to bring into reality, what were the major events during the project.

Approximately 9 months form start to book arrival in UK. There were many events which are memorable, but that’s what you expect with doing something for the first time. There are 3 which really stand out for me.

1, the first time Dav uploaded the first draft to the dropbox we had for file sharing. I was expecting some roughed out draft which would have placeholder images, what I saw was nearly a finished book. Months later I realize we since changed it a lot, but I will always recall how happy and relieved that first draft made me feel.

2. Finding a printer in Europe & then going on press and signing off on the final print sheets. We invested so much time and energy up to that point, it was wonderful to see that side of it. More importantly to feel so in control of the process, nothing was too much trouble to those master printers.

3.When the finished book arrived, despite having seen the finished printed sheet. I even had a complete set of sheets in my office, but nothing prepares you for the first time you see the finished article.
As you had never published a book before what made you think you could?

Working for Virgin gives you a level of “challenger brand” thinking, but also teaches you some hard and cold commercial disciplines. Rchard Branson himself is famous for saying “Screw it, Lets do it!” and that saying does resonate with me.

I believe I know when to engage and rely on others, and I am confident in my own judgement of people, to know who to trust, and also when to make a change which is necessary. There were a few times when something didn’t feel right, so I called and asked some people for an opinion. Sometimes I followed that view and sometimes I called someone else.

My bigger concern was not if I could publish a book or not, it was if I could publish a book which I would be proud of, be commercially successful, would lead to further things and bring joy to its buyers.
What do you think of your first published title?

I am very proud of it, I think we have done a good job at making a book which stands up against other books from vastly more experienced publishers. Ultimately if I was not the publisher I would buy this book and be pleased I did. I cannot say that about every book I have ever bought, and I have many.

What are your future plans?

Our plans are to publish more books going forwards. We are already in very early discussions with 4 photographers, of which there are some very well known names. For me it is about the artist, their involvement and the project itself. We are in no great hurry to get the next title into production, but when the right project presents itself we are equally ready to produce it quickly if need be.

How do you go about choosing which projects to invest in and produce?

There is no great science behind it as such. Firstly I need to believe its worth doing. I wish to create great “photo books” I am less interested in creating books purely for commercial reasons. Once I have a good feeling that it will stand alone as a beautiful book which can be packaged and have impact, then I have to think if it will sell. So of course commerciality does come into it.

So, how popular is the artist, how well known is the project, body of work & of course the artist. Is this something which will interest the press, does it have an exhibition planned, as I say there is no huge process behind this, it just needs to feel right, all things considered.

How much involvement in the book promotion are you expecting the photographers to do?

I think it is essential to the success of our model. The return is worth it, but I understand that it doesn’t come naturally to all. However people don’t buy a book because a certain publisher is involved, that’s maybe the starting point, a badge of quality or similar, but ultimately the book is about the artist or the work.

If someone was reading this and thinking of self publishing themselves, what advice would you give?

I would tell them to do it, it’s a fantastic and rewarding experience. Advice I am less likely to give, but if forced, it would be to understand what you are trying to create, price it correctly, and don’t spend your last penny expecting to make your fortune quickly.

Oh and have lots of storage space, and I means LOTS…

Will Clarkson "Game" project takes a contrary point of view to many purist landscape artists work who concentrate on the knee-jerk environmental point of view and presents the story of the gamekeeper, the oft maligned arch enemy of wildlife and landscape lover. We had a chance to put a few questions to Will about this alternative approach.

Can you give a bit of background about your introduction to photography and what motivated you toward the BA at the University of Arts London?

I started with (I think) a 35mm automatic canon camera when I was 18. Combined with a little travelling it gave me real pleasure, and photography become something I always wanted to explore. On leaving university in 2007, though, I ended up working in the City. It was great fun, but I soon realised it wasn’t for me, so I left after 4 years. By this point photography had become an overgrown hobby and I was spending more and more of my time with it. Being 27 at the time, I felt this was my last chance to take a big risk and try my hand professionally.

The photojournalism and documentary photography MA at LCC was the change in thinking I needed, and I hope it started me on a progression towards something more critical. It taught me to question the motives behind my own photography, making it harder but the results much more satisfying.

We are bombarded by images in ever-increasing amounts, it has become part of our daily intake and can have profound affect on our expectations of the world, so never more than today has a healthy cynicism of photography been necessary.

Your project ‘Game’ verges on social documentary, photojournalism and landscape and has very strong elements of narrative. How did you come to work on the project and what were your thoughts about representing the landscape element of it?

When starting this project, I was always disappointed on arrival in the glen and at first I couldn’t work out why. I came to realise that every time I came north I held in mind a certain set of expectations. In hindsight these were unrealistic notions of wilderness, so I set out to explore these expectations and where I got them from.

The landscape element, even though I didn’t use many landscapes in Game, is one of the most important in relation to our expectations of the land. In terms of aesthetic standard, landscape photography is a strong medium in the UK, however conceptually I sometimes find it less so, especially in the realm of conservation. We can’t save a wilderness. We can’t save something that doesn’t exist, but we can manage it for the best possible interests of future generations. Arguing occurs when people’s expectations are gulfs apart, and pragmatism melts away.
The landscapes I put into the book always contained fencelines, pylons, all the hallmarks of human interference. My point was that it is still a beautiful glen, and it is not a bad thing that we have influenced it.

Needless to say the debate concerning gamekeepers is a conservational and socio-political one, so this is indeed intended as social documentary in the context of a beautiful setting. I looked to self-styled conservation photographers and to their landscape photography and noticed some incongruent themes. Firstly that fence lines were very rare, domestic animals were rare, in fact human influences of the past 100 or so years were frequently left out. Landscape photography seeking to influence policy carries with it similar responsibility to a photojournalist – misleading public expectations leads the debate into polemical grounds from which few solutions will ever be found.

Your coverage of game keeping and land management tries to offer a counterbalance to the knee jerk environmentalist reaction. What were your own personal views and how did these change as you developed the project?

Well I wouldn’t say the environmentalist reaction is knee-jerk, but if you’re expecting a wilderness and you’re met with a deer-fence or a fenced-off woodland, you’re understandably going to be upset. But without these fences, Scotland would be worse off in biodiversity terms.

Gamekeeping carries with it a legacy that is hard to shake off. The modern gamekeepers, at least the majority that are the ones within the law, are not the poisoners, trappers, killers and exploiters of the land from old. They are cleverer than that now, and when even-handed they are excellent to the health of the local ecosystem. Seeing as they are paid for privately, they are an excellent source of preservation if they are directed to act in the benefits of that ecosystem. The conservational movement often distances itself from the gamekeeping community, but there are surprising parallels that I hope I illustrated in the book.

My views have had a convoluted journey, not least during this project. When younger I used to shoot, but on further investigation I find the pheasant shooting industry somewhat suspect and I no longer do that. I do not objecting to shooting for food, but I find it hard to believe that the UK consumes or sells 35 million pheasants (not to mention partridges etc) a year. Deer stalking is something different, and it is a necessary control on deer numbers. Whether people should pay for it is a different argument. The question is does it matter who pulls the trigger provided the person is sufficiently skilled to minimize suffering? I can’t decide. As it stands, the deer stalking industry in Scotland does do a lot of good, provides money and protects biodiversity and woodland. Maybe we will see changes down the line but I think this is a good system for now.

Representations of the Scottish landscape predominantly promote the wild and untouched aspects of the land. Your own views are quite the opposite and see the majority of the landscape as shaped by mans hand. How does this point of view affect your appreciation of landscape photography and shape your own work?

I believe it was Liz Wells who wrote that Scotland is not a wilderness but a “mosaic of cultural landscapes”. There is not anywhere in Scotland that is untouched by human interference, be it directly or indirectly. To say that representations of Scottish landscape promote wild and untouched aspects only exacerbates the misconception being perpetrated by so-called conservation photographers. It is not the photographs that I object to - they are excellent - but it is the context in which they are presented to the viewer.

The democratic balance of the UK now lies in cities, never more has the burden of representation lain more with those producing content (film/photography/etc) to be used in public spaces, and it is essential that the message is, if not directly accurate, at least not in the realms of fantasy. That is not to say there is no space for more conceptual or interpretive work or such landscape work concerning other subjects, but in this particular case the point stands.

Game was quite an epic challenge and was completed with an exhibition and a book - can you tell us about the highs and lows of the process of producing both of these?

Building a project like this is a great deal of talking, recording, photographing, videoing, then basically deleting it all and starting again. Finally it is honing all this work down into something coherent – it can really wear you down over time. The lows were breaking a camera in the Scottish rain (smoke came out from it…a new for me), the long days of getting the images required to tell the story and shaping the context with the text in the book – in a very tricky debate this is essential. The highs were these labours really bore fruit, and seeing the first copy of the book printed was incredibly exciting. It won’t change the world but it was a labour of love and that is satisfaction enough.

What next for your work and do you forsee any future landscape oriented projects?

I must confess that I am a very weak landscape photographer, although there is one ongoing exploration that I am struggling along with. Through the course of this work I used a 400mm lens to take ‘landscape details’ from one side of the glen to the other. The aim was to flatten the image, to react to the typical wider lens landscapes, to remove the skyline and show that the hillside, fences and all, are beautiful places too. This is early days, though, and I hope to keep working on it for some time to come. A mere reaction isn't a good use of my time or effort, so I want to make it more of a progression. We shall see!

Today I am trying to finish an edit of a Sri Lankan tea estate which is run by women, and is unusual in that Tamils and Sinhalese work alongside one another. Hopefully it will be ready next month.

You can see more of Will Clarkson's work at his website willclarkson.co.uk.

A background in business and snowboarding helped Jon Wyatt create a successful business in photography but the move from commercial photographer to fine art photographer isn't the easiest. We catch up with Jon just before he goes off on a holiday/tour/sabbatical around the world and ask him how he got into photography and why the change to a 'fine art' approach.

Can you give us some background on how you got into photography in the first place?

After completing a business degree it took the prospect of a year’s hitchhiking round Africa to nudge me into buying my first film slr. 90% of the resulting shots were abstract cloudscapes or landscapes of the remote desert areas that I'd been particularly drawn to. Those shots subsequently formed the core of my first photography website - http://www.skyscapes.co.uk. I put together some portfolios and the several art consultancies liked the work enough to promote it. At the same time I was an extremely keen snowboarder, and as my friends & I sought out some new and relatively unknown snowboarding destinations they convinced me to take my camera up the mountain.The companies we travelled and stayed with used some of the shots so I contacted some ski and snowboard companies and magazines and made more sales. I met some magazine staff writers and convinced them that i could illustrate more articles and after several years of making part-time photography/snowboard trips I turned full time freelance in 2003. I spent the next eight winters shooting editorial photography for ski and snowboard magazines and became known for working mainly in remote or unusual backcountry locations - editors would refer to them as 'aspirational' destination features. My photographic style tended towards shooting vast landscapes and panoramas with any skiers or riders usually small in the frame. Greenland, Kashmir and Alaska were particular highlights for me.

How did the transition from commercial work to a more project/art oriented approach happen?

It was a combination of several reasons really. I was based in the UK and flew everywhere, rather than some ski photographers who immerse themselves in one mountain area, and this eventually wore me down a little. After 9/11, flying with masses of photography and snowboarding kit had become much more complicated and expensive which didn't help, particularly with editorial budgets constantly tightening. But ultimately it was the rather instantly disposable nature of editorial magazine photography that made me reconsider my options.

I'd been lucky enough to shoot in so many amazing locations and had become aware that each destination had many other issues beyond what I was shooting for the ski magazines. My visits were often (though not always) brief and I felt that there was so much more to say about those destinations. Whilst still shooting for ski magazines I was part of a studio collective in London with several photographers who were studying photography MA's and that's where I really encountered the critical project-oriented approach first hand. I knew I wanted to work on longer-term projects and felt I had something to say, but it wasn't obvious how to proceed - and I didn't have the money to do an MA!

The transition appeared to have happened overnight but I imagine there were a few struggles along the way. What was that period like?

Whilst I was still shooting commercial ski-related work I'd entered various competitions and had been lucky enough to win an AOP award aswell as regularly showing prints as part of quite a few joint exhibitions. The studio collective (Roof Unit) I was part of had a joint exhibition of work with Brian Griffin and I won the Best Pro Photographer at Kendal Mountain Film Festival which led to a solo exhibition at the festival the following year. At this stage I still had a portfolio full of mostly unrelated landscapes so I immersed myself in the London gallery 'scene' to find out more about how it worked. I quickly realised that I can easily become over-saturated with images if I see too many, the sheer volume of photography simply overwhelming. If I have an idea which I think might work as a project a 'google' will quickly reveal how many times its been done before and it's all too easy to then fall prey to feelings of 'everything's been done before'. The 'usual' advice - shoot what you know or shoot what you love - is still a great starting point but the best advice I've heard came from musician Brian Eno who said 'don’t spend your time shooting at other people’s targets. Shoot your own arrow and paint a target around where it lands…' I like this idea of 'creating' a market for your own work - and I guess I've quite stubbornly made the work I want to make despite hitting quite a few dead ends in its marketing. I've discovered my work can tend to fall between different stools - its been described as 'too beautiful' by some of the more experimental contemporary galleries who believe that this detracts from the message; and some of my 'darker' work is not exactly suited to more 'traditional' landscape galleries. It can be slow and often demoralising process as you come to realise that your photography won't suit everyone, and even the people who it appeals to, might still not know how it should be marketed.

You’ve attended a few portfolio reviews, how was your first experience of this and how do you think it helped your photography?

My first portfolio review was at Rhubarb Rhubarb in Birmingham (2010) and I took a portfolio of mysterious, quite abstract mountainscapes and landscapes. It was very much hashed together from previous work and it (mostly) got thrown back at me for the underdeveloped concept. However there were glimpses of hope - some reviewers loved some of the work, some of the themes and styles. Undoubtedly one of the best things about reviews is that they force you to examine your own work critically. And to brutally edit your own work as objectively as possible. You generally have 20 minutes with each reviewer but you need to explain your own work in 5-10 mins max so you want to spend the rest of the time listening to the reviewer. Even if they don't link the work - you need to understand why. And the reviewer will always suggest someone who they think will like the work! The reviews force you to be able to answer questions about the work you're showing - why did you shoot that, why from that angle, what are you trying to say and so on. From my own standpoint and the type of work I now produce I wanted to meet curators, collectors and gallerists. However, most reviews have a cross section of reviewers from the editorial and advertising/commercial fields as well as the contemporary market.

As I have done more reviews you learn that even if your own work is good, often reviewers don't know what to do with it, or where to market it or it is simply 'not their bag'. While choice of reviewer is important as you try to figure out where your work 'fits' in the market, it's often the reviewers you least expect to get something from who surprise you with great leads or advice. And you should build up contacts by seeing the same people again and again each time you bring out new work. Gallerists and collectors are interested in whether you will be around for the long haul, they want to see how your work develops, and if you can repeatedly produce good work. Reviews are very much a long-term investment - generally nothing happens instantaneously, the gallery world in particular generally moving very slowly. They are expensive so you should choose events carefully - use small, cheap local events to polish your presentation skills and portfolio content, and then focus in on the markets you want to get into. And there's a lot of markets out there beyond the UK - I've done larger review events in France (Les Rencontres d'Arles) and in Portland, Oregon (Photolucida) and I've been lucky in that they have both lead to gallery representation.

You’ve worked on a couple of projects in China, notably Huangshan Ltd and Bamboo (Six Seconds). How did the idea for these projects come about and how did you fund them?

In 2009 I moved to a rural area of Suffolk and spent some time developing a framework for my photography. That framework, or overriding theme if you like, is one within which all my subsequent projects have fitted. The idea behind it came about when I realised that though I’d spent none of my adult life in Devon, I still consider the westcountry, and in particular Dartmoor, my spiritual ‘home’. This made me query how cultures turn to the landscape for collective identification – creating a ‘homeland’ as it were. Memories and cultural virtues are projected onto the landscape, giving it a moral and spiritual significance - originally by storytellers, poets and painters but these days also by photographers. Increasingly I feel that the bond with our homeland, the link between a culture and its physical landscape, is deteriorating. In a nutshell, we now adapt our environment to suit our own ends, rather than allowing our environment to shape who we are - working against ecosystems rather than with them. In trying to illustrate this through photography I’m constantly searching for tools within the landscape that articulate this growing spiritual and cultural detachment. These 'tools' enable me to use landscape photography to express a documentary point of view.

A Chinese reviewer who had been at Rhubarb Rhubarb liked my work and commissioned me, along with several other UK and US photographers, to visit south-east China. Yangzhou is a small city (by Chinese standards) with a rich history which the city authorities wanted a selection of photographers to record for the production of new publicity material for the city. Once that was complete I extended my stay in China. I'd researched wilderness areas and had discovered an area called Huangshan - of which I knew very little yet whose landscapes seemed strangely familiar. It’s at that point that several strands of the project came together very quickly. Firstly I discovered the well-documented phenomenon of its ‘seas’ of cloud and, as I mentioned, I’m always looking for aspects of the landscape that allow me to articulate, in the imagery, a documentary point of view. I felt these mists could be the perfect tool and the project 'Huangshan Ltd' came about.

Huangshan, which means ‘Yellow Mountain’, turned out to be one of China's most iconic national monuments. A range of mountains consisting of 72 granite peaks, the ‘Mount Huangshan Scenic Area’ covers an area of nearly 120 square miles and has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its habitat for rare and threatened species. It’s one of China’s top tourist attractions, and spiritually and culturally its iconic status ranks it with the Yangtze River and the Great Wall. Huangshan’s beauty has inspired centuries of poets, scholars and particularly painters – perhaps the reason its gnarled pines and sheer granite walls seemed so familiar to me. Known to the Chinese as ‘the number one mountain under heaven’, it is a ‘sister’ national park of Yosemite in the US. Yet the entire Mount Huangshan Scenic Area is owned and managed by one company, the ‘Huangshan Tourism & Development Company Ltd’ and is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. China’s decades of rapid economic reforms and the unwillingness of central government to allocate money and resources to such areas has led to this process of privatization. It’s a model that is being widely replicated for other iconic spiritual and historic sites, from Shaolin temples to sections of the Great Wall.

Whether this situation has ultimately been good or bad for the area involves an extremely complex set of arguments that I won’t go into here, but it was a situation that I wanted to gently draw attention to. And whether right or wrong, I felt the circumstances were indicative of our approach to other iconic environments – and it just didn’t sit right with me. I wanted to express this photographically - not by photographing the building sites and part-finished 5-star hotels high up in the Huangshan mountains but by showing the pristine landscape and using text to contrast and jar the emotions of the viewer. As I mentioned, the area's mists provided the perfect tool to illustrate my point. Witnessing first-hand the mists for which Huangshan is renowned – gossamer threads that drape the mountains and which periodically converge into dramatic ‘seas’ of cloud that surge and billow between the peaks - I knew that I wanted arrange the final images in such an order that would echo the natural process. If the images were seen in a book, or on a gallery wall, the cloud would appear to build up from one image to the next, eventually completely obscuring the landscape, before slowly dispersing again at the end of the series. I also knew from a previous series I’d made in the UK called ‘Avalanche UK’ which featured sites of fatal avalanches – in summer and devoid of snow - that by turning the images to black and white I could emphasise the textural nature of the granite cliffs, and focus the viewers attention on the encroaching clouds.

The project 'Bamboo (Six Seconds)' was shot on the same trip. It was an idea I'd had at the back of my mind for a year or two ever since I'd heard the fact that every six seconds fifteen acres of the planet are deforested - that's 60,000 sq metres, or six hectares, or nine football pitches.. In the same way as I had used the mists of Huangshan as a tool, I wanted to use six-second exposures to convey this deforestation fact. I discovered that to the Chinese bamboo holds iconic status, representing the harmony between nature and man – and symbolising civilisation. In myths, literature, calligraphy and painting bamboo’s characteristics embody the finest human virtues – integrity, humility and purity. And comparing a person to bamboo is considered the highest possible praise of their character. Armed with this information I could see that this project would fit ideally with my framework.

Bamboo is often touted as a miracle crop to counter deforestation, being one of the fastest growing plants on earth. Growing up to four feet a day, one hectare of bamboo sequesters sixty-two tons of carbon dioxide per year. Generating up to 35% more oxygen than an equivalent stand of trees, it can be used to produce everything from food, fabrics, paper, building material and oil. However, rising demand from the west has, ironically, brought new environmental concerns for bamboo forests. Increased use of unregulated pesticides for production plus the strong chemical solvents required to process the bamboo have poisoned watercourses and threaten precious animal habitat.

Indiscriminate harvesting has resulted in half the world's species of bamboo now being in imminent danger of extinction. Like Huangshan, the bamboo forest is another ecosystem steeped in iconography and cultural values, which finds its existence threatened, at the centre of a complex set of arguments which I hope to use my photography to gently draw attention to. And time (the six second exposure) was the tool that I chose to use.

You specialised in mountain sport photography, a very competitive market. How did you differentiate yourself?

As I hinted at in the answer to your first question I essentially thought of my work as shooting landscapes which just happened to have skiers and snowboarders in them, rather than thinking of myself as an 'action' photographer. Hence the figures tended to be quite distant. Often most of my work would take place in areas outside of regular ski resorts, usually accessed only ski-touring. This was the type of work I was drawn to and I felt that this approach matched the article texts which were often more about the landscape and destination than the skiing. Though I did push the format of the landscape approach to extremes, once presenting an art director of a traditional ski magazine with an assignment shot almost completely in panoramic format. And though I'd said he could crop in, to his credit he devised a layout combining three panoramas to each of several double page spreads.

Many of your mountain photographs show people as an almost insignificant part of the environment. Do you plan to include people in your future projects, even if only at a distance?

A lot of my work uses ways of disguising the scale of a landscape to deliberately create mystery and to, hopefully, intrigue the viewer. I'm striving for something innate in the image which creates an unsettling effect for the viewer causing them to question the image - to inquire more closely, and to suggest there might be more to the picture than initially perceived. I've found using figures in the landscape often negates these effects. The eye is usually drawn immediately to the figure, the viewer asking what must that person be seeing/feeling/experiencing. That's not what I want the viewer to be considering when looking at my images. Having said that, if any upcoming projects, that fit within my framework, call for this approach then it's certainly something I won't rule out.

Your taking a ‘sabbatical’ from commercial photography to concentrate on your art/project oriented work. Can you tell us a little about your plans?

Actually to be strictly correct I'm not taking a sabbatical from 'commercial' photography. I find that these days the contemporary market - dealing with galleries, exhibitions, art consultants, collectors etc - takes up more and more of my time, and hence results in a greater proportion of my income. So I've been doing far less 'commercial' work. My personal projects aren't 'personal projects' any more and instead they take up the majority of my time and are becoming more 'commercial' than the 'commercial' photography you're referring to in the question.

However, yes, I am taking a sabbatical with my partner for six months with some travelling in New Zealand, China and some of south east Asia. The timing is mainly to do with her changing jobs. We will, however, be visiting a couple of locations that could feature as part of my next photographic project, so I'll be packing a pared down Phase One kit!

Read Jon's 4x4 portfolio