I have been looking again at a group of 8×10 contact sheets made over the last few years at Stonehenge, Kirkstone Quarry, Inversnaid, and Ardtalla on Islay.
They have started to feel less like separate bodies of work and more like evidence of a longer argument: about landscape, architecture, stone, time, and what it means to make something that might last.
Working with an 8×10 camera in the landscape is difficult in ways that are hard to romanticise once you have actually done it. The equipment is heavy. The process is slow. You are constantly trying to judge tone, mass, relation, density, and feeling on a ground glass plane that tells you almost nothing.
At Kirkstone Quarry, the landscape is not picturesque. It has been opened. Cut. Worked. It shows stone not as scenery but as matter under pressure, matter interrupted, matter made available. A quarry face is an argument between geology and use. It is both wound and resource. It exposes duration in section. The camera begins to read the place not as surface but as a condition: force, fracture, compression, extraction, craft.
Inversnaid is different. There the water keeps undoing certainty. The burn breaks the landscape apart and joins it again. It worries the rock, polishes it, stains it, cuts through it. Nothing is still, but nothing is random. The 8×10 camera is almost absurd in that setting, too slow for the movement, too formal for the disorder. It forces a confrontation between flow and fixity. The photograph becomes a experiment in measuring time in a place that will not stop moving.
At Ardtalla, on Islay, the edge of the land feels stripped back to essentials: stone, sand, water, weather, distance. It is less dramatic than it is ancient. Things arrive, are broken down, carried off, returned. The place does not perform. You begin to understand erosion not as loss, but as a kind of authorship.
The connection between my large format landscape work and my photography of the built environment was not obvious to me at first. I thought they belonged to different parts of my life. But both are about looking hard at matter. Both are about the intelligence of materials. Both are about time as the real judge of form.
The 8×10 camera punishes casualness. It punishes approximation. It punishes the decorative impulse. You have to mean it. You have to decide where to stand, and why. You have to accept that the photograph may fail despite everything. There is no endless digital variation, no easy correction, no casual abundance. Each sheet of film carries consequence.
And perhaps that is the point.
The future of architecture will require a deeper memory of material intelligence. It will require us to recognise that some things last not because they are inert, but because they are exact. Because they have already survived pressure, weather, extraction, labour, use, and time.
I am beginning to see this body of work as part of that conversation.
