I first worked with David on his student housing at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, back in 1991, it had been a serendipitous meeting. I liked him at once. He had studied architecture at Cambridge under Leslie Martin, alongside Colin St John Wilson and Colin Rowe. I had started my own career in photography in Cambridge, often working with Martin’s former colleagues and students. His way of thinking about buildings—how they shaped places, how they fitted into the world—made immediate sense to me. There was no need for explanation; it was simply the way things ought to be done. It all felt vey comfortable and correct.
In 2010, David asked me to photograph WISE. The building was unfinished, and everyone involved was exhausted. It had been a colossal effort, and they were struggling to see it through. I was in the middle of an impossibly busy year. There was no budget. But when David called, the answer was always yes. The details could wait.
The Wales Institute for Sustainable Education stands at the Centre for Alternative Technology, near Machynlleth. Designed with Pat Borer, it is built mostly from natural materials, it is made of timber and limecrete, with walls of hempcrete washed in bright lime render. Wherever you stand, the inside and outside are in constant conversation. Wide sliding windows, hidden peepholes, and the great oculus over the auditorium bring in the light, shifting and changing as the day moves on.
It is, in short, magnificent.
2010 I was in the middle of a minor crisis in my photography. I had committed to digital, but hated the equipment. Forced to work on DSLR’s that seemed frightful, dumb boxes. Incapable of the soaring (!) control and expressive possibilities of my large format film cameras. However, by the time I got to WISE I was working with Linhof again. Beautifully engineered monorail cameras with exquisite camera movements, capable of perfect perspective and compositional control, and fitted with a digital back!
All of this sounds ideal, except for the fly in the ointment – Photoshop. Now many photographers loved it. I, well, I was not so sure. Everything looked so synthetic, forced, unnatural. So I’d taken a very purist path, all files were processed as though they were film. Absolutely no retouching whatsoever. The truth or nothing.
So it is this spirit, the spirit of an old school photographer, that I offer up these original, unretouched and unmodified photographs. A halting and inadequate homage to analogue, and craft.
Which, given the context, seems quite appropriate.
