Max A Rush

Max Rush

Max A Rush is a professional landscape photographer specialising in London’s parks and gardens. With a background in art, music and natural history, he first became interested in photography while working as a naturalist for the national parks service in Quebec. He continued his studies in the UK with a series on the mid Wales landscape and then, on moving to London began photographing his local park.

maxarush.com

Charlotte Parkin

Head of Marketing & Sub Editor for On Landscape. Dabble in digital photography, open water swimmer, cooking buff & yogi.

Max first got in touch in 2014, when we featured his Brockwell Park project in an exhibition at Carnegie Library Gallery. Since then, we’ve published four more articles on his photography and the camera he built by hand.

This year, after Max won International Garden Photographer of the Year, it felt like a good time to check in again—to see how his work has progressed and hear about his latest project: building another 5x4 camera.

Tell us about why you love landscape photography? A little background on what your first passions were, what you studied and what job you ended up doing.

I don’t think I knew anything at all about landscape photography when I was younger. What I really spent my time doing when I was a child was building and inventing things, drawing and painting and studying the natural world. When I was 5 or 6 I discovered Sellotape and started trying to make machines out of cardboard and paper, and then worked my way up through wood, plastic and metal. I built pottery kilns in my garden and a miniature foundry which I used for casting in aluminium, brass and bronze, so I became quite committed to making things properly. My granddad, who was a precision engineer and inventor of mechanical printing machines taught me a lot about engineering. I used my growing set of new techniques and materials to make the things I found interesting, and quite a lot of these were related to light: projectors, microscopes and telescopes. My grandparents sometimes took me to the theatre and I was always interested in the different kinds of lights, which I tried to re-create at home. When I was a bit older this led to creative conflicts as I was just as interested in acting and being in the spotlight as I was making the spotlight itself, although I’ve managed to keep doing both on and off. The last spotlights I made were quite substantial and I still use them for portraits.

At the same time I loved natural history and learned a lot about insects and plants. I bred moths at home, which my mum was interested in, and my earliest attempts at taking pictures were mainly to record insects I’d seen at home or on holiday.

We’d often go to France in the summer and the time I spent in the countryside and the mountains made a big impression on me. Even then, despite being in some spectacular places, I don’t remember the scenery as much as the insects or the lizards I’d try to get close to, although I did become very interested in the weather, which like a lot of things just seemed more intense and dramatic there than it was in England. I loved watching thunderstorms and was so curious about lightning that I built high voltage generators back at home to do experiments. It might seem difficult to reconcile these things but from making huge sparks in a dark room and roaming around under the big beautiful skies of France there was a kind of romantic admiration for nature that I felt alongside curiosity, and I don’t see any problem with looking at the world simultaneously as an artist and a scientist. Maybe the simple explanation for why I’m a landscape photographer is just that art and illustration were second nature to me and I had a particular interest in skies and plants.