Why I don’t like landscapes

When I was younger and still using an automatic film camera I used to absolutely love taking photos of, as I saw them, dramatic landscapes, great buildings, exciting views and that kind of thing. But then I’d get home, my dad would pay for them to be developed and he and my mum would tell me that, although they were good photographs there was no-one in any of them, which for holiday pictures was often more than a little odd.

Now, it’s difficult whether the chicken or the egg came first in this situation but I do remember that around the time that I’d heard this it was my teenage years and my photographic dark ages. I don’t have any memories of taking photographs as keenly as I had done up until this point. Teenage boredom I think is more to blame than anything else.

When I came back to my interests in photography with my first digital camera I took a few landscape pictures, and to be fair, they were pretty cool but to me they always feel like they lack something. It’s very strange to start out taking photographs of ‘things’ to then abandon this almost wholeheartedly in favour of taking photographs of people. But I have, I soon discovered that what I really, really love is working with people. The words don’t actually do that justice and I’m aware that it sounds like a cliché but I really do get passionate about it, I particularly enjoy working with people who hate cameras and photographs of themselves and building confidence - but that is for another post.

I’ll finish by saying that I think my apathy for landscapes extends maybe not on all too far a tenuous link to disliking photographs of famous things. That is to say people taking photographs of Big Ben, with automatic cameras and the flash switched on. I think it’s great that people want to record their trip to somewhere special by standing in front of it/under it/on it/in it and taking a photograph. This is what I did, but in my youth I took it to the other extreme and left out the people entirely. However, I got to thinking about this about a year ago and I thought it seemed quite patronising and boorish of me to poo-poo other people’s holiday snaps but I knew it wasn’t that attitude which was compelling my feelings about this type of photography.


And then I realised why I needed to create my London Postcards series, these photographs are taken at some of London’s key tourist attractions and I photograph people taking photographs of landmarks, with/without their friends or loved ones in their shot. Every time I update the collection of post cards I want to laugh, because this for me is a more accurate memory of someone’s visit. Take person A (photographer) and person B (friend in photo stood in front of landmark), when person A looks at the picture later they remember how difficult it was to get that shot with all the other people walking past and it’s a shame that a particular feature of the landmark was obscured. Person B on the other hand is probably looking at the picture thinking, all I remember is A bobbing up and down whilst I stood like a lemon in front of that landmark. My London Postcards capture both A and B in the moment of lemon standing and bobbing around looking for the perfect shot. These are taken with love in my heart and a big smile on my face, please view them in that light, they’re absolutely not mean to be patronising or offensive.