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I'm an architectural photographer. I travel around Britain interacting with special places. I work from my camper van called Woody and I share my experiences via this digest.
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A day in the light at Wells.
'There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of the day, so do I.'
John Steinbeck Travels With Charley.
Thirty Six Views.
My visit to St. Mary and All Saints in Dunsfold, Surrey was my first trip out after lockdown. There is a photograph of me peeping from inside the great yew there, but I was putting a brave face on; behind the smile, I was reeling inside. I was suffering from a lockdown-induced agoraphobia which didn't work well within the open skies and rolling fields of Surrey.
It took several months and some counselling to help me work through my feelings, but my visit to Dunsfold started a thread of recovery that had something to do with my photography of the ancient yew tree that I hid behind.
Photographing the tree at Dunsfold drew me into an act of observation that distilled my anxious thoughts. But there was something more: capturing the tree from different perspectives led me along a thread to an artist that crystallised a way of thinking that has helped me overcome the most challenging obstacles.
The thread didn’t start at Dunsfold, it began at Wells where I photographed a series of images of the cathedral over a single day. I was stood behind the camera for a long time and, after a few hours, I began to get the peculiar feeling that the building was trying to tell me something.
The light was so quick and intense on that day that every time I looked up to the facade, I saw a different building. I soon realised that the huge Gothic edifice at Wells had a complex and ever-changing personality.
My photography at Wells was inspired and underpinned by some words by John Berger where he describes a mountain:
‘There are certain moments of looking at a familiar mountain which are unrepeatable. A question of a particular light, an exact temperature, the wind, the season. You could live seven lives and never see the mountain quite like that again, its face is as specific as a momentary glance across a table at breakfast. A mountain stays in the same place, and can almost be considered immortal, but to those who are familiar with the mountain, it never repeats itself. ’
And in the peculiar kind of way that random moments from our lives link together into a greater whole, my Berger inspired work to capture Wells in a day, led me to David Hockney's photo montages; and Hockney's montages finally took me to a Japanese artist called Hokusai.
And through Hokusai’s eyes I finished the thread that had taken me from Wells to Dunsfold and to numerous places after that. For in his body of work called Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, Hokusai masterfully orchestrates a myriad of perspectives, transforming a singular, immutable mass like Mount Fuji into a shape-shifting canvas at the whims of the artist’s brush. His visionary views celebrate the boundless complexity, imaginative prowess, and enduring resilience of the human mind.
I had sensed it in the creative act of photographing the tree at Dunsfold, but it was through Hokusai's art where I found the unequivocal and undeniable truth that, no matter how stuck or overwhelming life might be, there are numerous alternative perspectives that have the power to unburden us.
'Sometimes it takes an artist, or a series of photographs…or a singular work of art to distil a complex series of emotions into a singular revelation that leads to unburdening and renewal.' says Laura Cummings...
'Seeing is everything. Looking is everything...If I had no more speech, hearing or movement, I would still have the active life of looking; and the luxury of its replay in my dreams at night. The insatiable longing is constantly and miraculously fulfilled; pure joy, total gratitude. And art increases this looking, gives you other eyes to see with, other ways of seeing, other visions of existence.
Art and artists enlarge our world.'
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Thirty Six Views of Beverley Minster
The warp to the weft of the weave that led me to Hokusai has been the minster at Beverley in Yorkshire.
I urge everybody to find a place away from their home and get to know it well over a lifetime. For decades I have been photographing the minster (some of them even got into a book).
In the hope that they help others unburden and renew as much as they have for me it gives me the greatest pleasure to present - in the spirit of Hokusai - my Thirty Six Views of Beverley Minster.
Thirty Six Views of Woody
A new thread is born.
And Hokusai ...
begat Hiroshega who also painted Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji.
I bought a book that showed all of Hiroshega's views in a concertina format. Unravelling the treasures within is a joy.
And the thread that I had been following, momentarily twisted, changed direction and bound itself into another weave. For the concertina book on Hiroshega's Fuji gave me an idea...
....an overwhelming desire to capture the joy of what I've seen on my travels in Woody onto a concertina sketchbook all of my own.
And so a new thread has begun.
Tag along and hang onto your coattails, I've a feeling we might be going places.
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Photographs and words by Andy Marshall (unless otherwise stated). Most photographs are taken with Iphone 14 Pro and DJI Mini 3 Pro.
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