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Tim Parkin
Tim Parkin is a landscape photographer living in Scotland who co-founded On Landscape magazine. Alongside his photography and writing he also co-founded the Natural Landscape Photography Awards, runs a film scanning business and is a judge for other international landscape and nature competitions.
Francesco has written a collection of excellent articles for On Landscape about the history of art, and his first book about Fontainebleau wove its visual narrative around those early painters, in that case, the Barbizon school.
In this most recent book, Francesco has chosen to aim his artistic eye at what might seem at first a very small target. The premise is reflected (sorry!) in the title, “The Colour of Water”, and every photograph in the book is of water. But that’s like saying that every landscape photograph is of air - scientifically true, but just like the light from the landscape passes through that air, the light of the landscape is reflected and moderated by its passage through (or reflected from) water. (A topic Keith Beven has written about at length in articles for On Landscape - e.g. "The Physics of Caustics on Water")
And there lies the trick behind the book's title. Water doesn’t have colour, in fact, water is almost impossible to photograph. What we really see when we photograph water in its many forms is just a distortion - sometimes minor on still, calm days when a reflected view can be indistinguishable from its original scene - sometimes impossible to decipher when water becomes a funhouse mirror or even ‘white water’.
And so Francesco’s book becomes an exploration of the landscape via the infinite different prisms through which it is seen. This becomes one of the pleasures of browsing the book - exploring these transformations alongside the photographer.
It wouldn’t be a book by Francensco if it didn’t also include some excellent essays and quotations referencing the history of art. A couple of my favourites are
“I found that I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any other way, things that I had no words for.” - Georgia O'Keeffe
And particularly …
"What we hope for from the experience of landscape is not escape but revelation, not an escape from life but a revelation about it." - Robert Adams
Francesco’s book epitomises the experience of exploration and discovery, the cornerstone of the artistic experience. And it’s an inspiration to try your own experiments exploiting the ephemeral form of water. The results are never as important as the journey.
You can buy Francesco’s book (and see more of his photos) at his website and store, priced at 20 Euros.
