Islay in my old Defender — an act of motoring faith or insanity, depending on your point of view. I’ll choose faith, and my AA membership.
With me, my Canham metal 8×10” folding field camera. An 8×10 camera is a tool of unerring documentation; you need to bring your ‘A’ game. It doesn’t forgive error. Slight mistake and all the effort is wasted, why would you do that to yourself? You’re stacking the odds for monumental failure and misery. Best get on with it.
The island, drenched by persistent gales and rain, presents a landscape austere and stripped of ornament. The wind, the sea, the cold. Life — it’s tough (maybe that’s why they make great whisky). If you need to feel something, find some rocks and sit and gaze long at the Atlantic on the edge of Islay. As Nietzsche would have it, the Atlantic also gazes into you. And that takes some courage.
Against the backdrop of the unyielding wind and the ever-present rain, there’s an unspoken agreement with the certainty of the task at hand. The light filtering through the heavy grey sky casts everything in stark relief — an ever-present reminder that the objective record must be maintained without deviation. Nothing here is getting a break, neither should you.
On the edge of the sea, you can feel both small and, interestingly, eternal — that strange sense of being part of something vast, when the waves crash in. Standing on a rock, spinning through space and the water that soaks you — because, well, you moved into it while it was trying to stand still. That’s an odd sensation. Thank you, Galileo and Newton — a day on the beach made complicated.
It always feels like an exciting prospect — going equipped. The camera, the film, the lenses. All that preparation, all those acquired skills. In the photography community, this kind of shot is affectionately dismissed as “rocks and twigs.” After Sontag and Barthes, the New Topographics, the passing of Ansel, Brett, and Edward — all those West Coast super-sharp f64 realists — after pollution, development, and man-altered landscapes, maybe this kind of photograph hurts too much. A sort of look what we had, look what we lost. Innocence and wonder doesn’t play well in a post-Hiroshima world. Sentimental? Perhaps. Either way, we’re back to Nietzsche
In the intervals between exposures, there is time for doubt. At the moment the composition is decided, the exposure calculated, the dark slide loaded, the shutter primed — that moment always feels certain. Then, well — you’re back to doubt again. Maybe that’s why we make photographs. A fraction of a second at f11 full of certainty, clarity, and vision — and then it’s gone. Just a moment of self-realization and union with the divine. Truth? I wonder what Nietzsche would make of that.
