The year had been heavy, a slow unwinding of commitments and endings. My projects were tying off, the last threads of my work with the Clocktower Gallery being carefully archived, the rituals of closure. It was the kind of work that leaves you empty; hopes, dreams, disappointments. A sense of time wasted, of futile effort. Illusions, of course, but it takes time to place it all in context.
I felt that familiar pull to leave the city and its obligations behind. As it has always done, Scotland beckoned, not just as a destination, but as a necessary resetting of the senses.
New Year in Glasgow, the best place on earth to greet another turning of the calendar, well practiced, evenings of those mad, occasionally drunken conversations, discovering who was ‘off the islands, or ‘on the rigs’. Unpredictable and affirming.
And then the cold silence of a bothy in Glen Prosen, a quiet wooded backwater, with all the wild and rugged splendour of the Angus glens. Later, a simple room in Morar. These were not just geographic shifts; they were changes of aperture, a way of allowing more light into the frame.
My ambitions, as ever, were for the monumental. I had in mind the heroic mountain profiles. I imagined photographs in the tradition of Ansel Adams’ Yosemite, those precise, high-contrast meditations on grandeur. But the mountains, majestic as they were, kept their distance.
Instead, my eye was drawn lower, to the beaches. To the quiet dialogue between rock, pebble, sand, and tide. It was here that I felt the same stillness Paul Strand found in his later landscapes: the absolute integrity of place, pared down to essentials.
Strand knew that the drama of a scene does not always depend on height or scale, but on the density of meaning within its simplest forms. A smooth pebble against coarse sand can hold more truth than an entire landscape, at least it can feel that way.
The compositions became more intimate, but no less architectural in their structure. In the curve of a shoreline, I saw the rigor of Richard Long’s walking lines. In the wash of tide over a black rock, the tonal gradations of a Hiroshi Sugimoto seascape. Each frame became an excavation, an uncovering, the beach as both archive and altar.
There is a peculiar authority in such modest subjects. You kneel to take the picture, and in doing so, submit to their scale. You notice the striations in a single stone, the way the wet sand mirrors the sky, the faint, transient lattice left by retreating foam. It is a reminder, something philosophers and poets have been telling us for centuries, that an entire universe can be observed in a grain of sand.
And perhaps that is the lesson: what you are looking for is rarely where you expect it. It is not always on the horizon or at the summit; it may be lying quietly beneath your feet, waiting for you to look down and adjust your focus.
Gardener’s Bothy Kirriemuir
Arisaig.
