The Bookshelf #19 - Landscape in Britain; Charlie Waite and Adam Nicolson
Landscape in Britain
Charlie Waite with commentary from Adam Nicolson
Pavillion Books (1984)
Available on Amazon from £3.69
This is yet another book that I picked up as part of a second-hand purchase I made on Amazon a couple of weeks ago, with the intention of growing my collection and simply having something new to look at.
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This is an old book, first published in 1984, and it was successful enough to have a number of additional print runs, which is understandable given that Charlie Waite is one of the UK’s most important landscape photographers of the last 50 years.
Looking through this book makes you realise that compositions don’t need to be complicated, and they don’t always need to be minimalist, which seems to be pretty fashionable in the landscape photography world at the moment. It shows you that simple compositions can work really well. A number of the images in the book make use of leading lines and the rule of thirds, but they rarely feel like photographs that have been constructed around a set of rules.
It also shows that you don’t need a crazy or immediately obvious subject. Sometimes a road, a wall, a collection of trees or the shape of the landscape itself is enough. There is quite a lot to learn here about simply looking at what is in front of you and finding a photograph within it.
The imagery in this book, given its age, is almost certainly shot entirely on film, and Waite doesn’t shy away from film grain. It is effectively used in a number of the images and is simply a by-product of the film stock and camera settings that were used. It kind of proves the point that you don’t need the latest gear to create the shots you want. There are photographs in here made more than 40 years ago that still stand up perfectly well today.
The book shows images from around the country, rather than concentrating on the obvious landscape photography locations. There are certainly dramatic landscapes, but there are also quieter photographs of the British countryside that probably wouldn’t attract hundreds of photographers with tripods today. I actually think that is one of the most interesting things about it.
It is also fascinating to look at Britain through a photographer’s eyes from the early 1980s. Some of the landscapes are instantly recognisable, while others feel like records of a slightly different country. Roads, farms, buildings and villages inevitably change, and that gives some of the photographs an additional documentary value that probably wasn’t as obvious when the book was originally published.
There is something refreshing about looking through an older landscape photography book like this. There is no discussion about megapixels, dynamic range, focus stacking or whether somebody used the latest lens. You are just left with the photographs.
And, ultimately, that is probably the biggest thing I took away from it.
Good landscape photography has very little to do with how new your camera is and quite a lot to do with noticing what is in front of you.
Available on Amazon from £3.69
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