All In The Detail

Sometimes, you need a plan.

You have to work towards a goal, build a project, be focused. I’m terrible at being focused, more like the dogs on the film Up every time they hear the word Squirrel! Easily distracted and lacking a clear objective. My wife on the other hand is very good at ideas and planning. After owning up the other week that I’m a bit at a loss as to what direction I should proceed, I happened upon a book.

It is about Artists Homes and how their homes reflect their art, feed their creativity and occasionally provide some form of respite from their work.

There’s a character in Charles Dickens Great Expectations called Wemmick. He is clerk to the barrister Mr Jaggers. Wemmick takes the main character Pip under his wing and invites him to his home for tea. Wemmicks house is an elaborate mini castle like building, which serves to act as a retreat from the work environment. He doesn’t discuss work at home and keeps the two parts of his life separate.

Anyway back to Artists Homes. It’s a beautiful book with some really good portrait and home interiors photography. I noticed however that nearly all the artists are based in the South of England.

I thought about this book and whether I could do a similar one but focused on artists in my neck of the woods, namely West Yorkshire and in particular, the Calder Valley. I live next door to Hebden Bridge which has long been a Mecca for artists, writers, musicians, creatives of all sorts. My wife is an artist who has had studios in Hebden Bridge for 30 years and knows a great number of very talented and interesting creative types. I do photo shoots of artists in their studios but peoples homes are often a reflection of the person/people.

I decided to trade some camera gear in to fund a purchase almost in mind of this project. I wanted a camera that I could use old lenses on but that has brilliant resolution and a film like output. I therefore bought a medium format Fujifilm GFX 50R. It’s relatively old, slow and clunky but it can produce beautiful high resolution images, particularly portraiture.

I’ve been out with it a couple of times since its arrival last week and I’ve used old Pentax film lenses, a Russian Helios and East German Carl Zeiss Jena lens and I’m hooked. The detail you can get is stunning and what you can recover in shadows is fabulous. I want to slow my photography down too. I want to practice being more considered, more intentional and less worried about numbers or speed. The GFX 50R isn’t designed for fast action or sports. It is a photography based camera and specialises in enabling you to get images with character, depth and detail. You can’t rush it so therefore, I have to take my time and in turn take less images but more purposeful ones.

I will be contacting several artists and makers to see whether they would be willing to let me into their homes and have a chat. It won’t cost them anything and I want to promote those artists but at the same time, produce a book that gives an insight into the people we buy from, admire or are inspired by their art. If they are Wemmicks, that says as much about them and their approach to their work as those that bring their style and creativity into their homes. As a photographer living with a painter/designer, you can definitely tell that we Bring our work home and weave it into the very fabric of our lives.