While waiting for the test prints to arrive from DS Labs, I thought I would try something different. Inspired by the photographic collage technique and methods of Noel Myles, I created the following compound image.
These are images taken in May 2017 when I first started experimenting with interval timer shooting and timelapse photography. The piece is comprised of 24 individual images that I’ve combined using Adobe Photoshop. The subject is the Longford River, which flows through Bushy Park. They were taken on a particular stretch of the river where the sun hits the water at a certain of day, creating the most hypnotising reflections.
This piece was inspired by Myles’ similar obsession to mine of going repeatedly to the same place and taking extreme amounts of images. This is a thread that runs through my own practice and the basis of the majority of my work. I was always criticised by my classmates at Richmond School of Art of ‘taking too many shots’. At the time, I took this a negative aspect, but now I realise it’s how I work.
I also realised that I had tried something similar during the AGM60 Research & Experimentation module.
There are centuries worth of modes of depiction that are not restricted to the single viewpoint, for photographers to inspect.
(Myles, N. 2020)
Figure 1
When investigating Noel Myles’ work further, I realised that there was more than just a passing affinity with my own practice. This was initially sparked by seeing the above image. I had first seen this as a reproduced, fully Black & White palladium print in Into The Woods. When I saw this version that features both colour and Black & White, I knew I had to dig deeper.
In this video, Noel Myles discusses his work shown at the Minories Gallery in 2013.
The following are relevant transcripts and notes taken from this video:
“Single frame photographs don’t really depict our continuum of life and our sense of transition. I don’t feel that the static viewpoint and that fractional moment that might be comitance to the ‘decisive moment’ adequately conveys our experience of being alive. So I started to explore the pulling together of individual single frames taken over an extended period of time from several viewpoints.”
When discussing two composite images of the same tree using different images, Myles says that, by hanging them side-by-side, it shows:
“There is no definitive view, there’s no definitive composition: you can make as many versions and approaches as you like. And the more you look at these two, the more you see the differences.”
Myles continues with a further breakdown of the story behind these images:
“They started life as palladium prints and what I wanted to do at that time was to break away from the rectangle, the rectangular photograph and, even in some cases, break out of the little individual rectangle.”
When looking at this image, Myles focuses on the details on the upper part of the piece to point out how the individual branches have broken the lines further. Myles states ‘why’:
“I was trying very had to break out of this normal rectangular framework.”
Myles then moves onto these three pieces in which the images have been split up.
The reason behind it, Myles explains, is:
“To try to give a nod to the way the eye moves over a subject. Although the world is not broken up in our vision, we concentrate on certain aspects and half ignore what’s surrounding them. This is one of the motivations behind making these images. The other concern was to try to bring the image up to the surface of the paper to try and deny this recessive depth that you get with in most photographs. You sort of look ‘into’ and you look ‘down’ and I wanted to bring the image up to the surface and stay on the surface.”
“I was also very much aware of one my strongest influences and strongest likes and loves was Cezanne’s watercolour paintings where there are just small, discreet areas of colour and pencil and large areas of white, and the white of the paper is the white of the Provencal light. They’re wonderful evocations of this intense light and it’s almost as if what he was just painting, the little bits of colour you would see, are what was going on in the shadows. These (images) refer to that.”
Myles then moves onto another compound image called ‘A Short Film of Rough Water’.
In the same way Myles photographs his trees by returning to the same one multiple times, he took these images of water from the same bridge over the River Stour. This is of another river, which was taken over a relatively short period of two days.
Myles explained that there is a central image, which was taken when the water was at its shallow-most point. This gives a ‘central weight’ to the image. Myels then ‘builds’ two ‘wings’ (one either side) coming out from this central point, a method that he has used in many of his pieces.
With this work, Myles is questioning ‘what constitutes a photograph as depicting landscape and how varied that depiction can be’.
This video ends with showing further examples of Myles’ compound photography work.
To give a deeper understanding, this an extract from Reframing Photography written by the photographer regarding his Still Films series:
The challenge I faced with photography was that the instantaneous static viewpoint, provided by the camera’s lens and shutter, didn’t represent the continuous flow of the act of looking. It seemed as if the still photograph had been held back to the level of the dictionary; the single word. It was the visual equivalent of overlooking the potential to link words to convey ideas and meaning. I couldn’t accept the notion of an isolated, decisive moment being capable of encapsulating our experience of life.
I photograph whatever catches my eye; accumulating this material over hours, days or weeks. Several visits might be made to the same location. I think of these frames as the components of the photograph, not photographs themselves. The creative part of the process takes place in the studio, away from the camera. I look for formal qualities of line, tone, texture and colour, as well as subject matter, to link the individual units. The composition evolves by adding and removing; searching for harmonious connections. I have worked with both negatives and prints. The negatives were exposed onto a single sheet of platinum and palladium paper. Recently, I have added colour contact prints to earlier palladium photographs; in some cases photographing the same tree a decade later.
It seems to me that photographers have largely adhered to the pictorial conventions that prevailed at the time when photographs were first made permanent. I am surprised that when painters broke away from following renaissance laws of perspective at the end of the 19th century, photographers didn’t go with them. It makes no sense to say photography liberated painters to explore new modes of depiction. It is worth noting the first exhibition of Cezanne’s watercolours in America, was held in Stieglitz’s own gallery, ’291’ in 1911 but seemed to have had little influence on photographers. There are centuries worth of modes of depiction that are not restricted to the single viewpoint, for photographers to inspect.
Perhaps it’s true that good photographs are made, not shot, taken or captured. The task for photographers is to transcend the mirrored anecdote to reveal significance in our surroundings that makes us pause for thought. Perhaps it’s always been this way. I think of my own work as exploring the territory between still photography and moving image, hence the umbrella title ‘Still Films’. My reference points are within painting, not photography. I find constant stimulus in Cezanne’s watercolours, Cubism, Romanesque art and Rothko’s painting.
At the time of writing, I was still processing the information I had discovered. I knew I would have to let it simmer, reread it then see what would result.
After posting this entry, I came across the following video featuring Myles and the collage piece he created while Artist in Residence at ITN.
Images
Figure 1: Noel Myles, Still Film of an Oak at Wormingford No 7, 2011
Figure 2: Montagne Sainte Victoire 1905-6 Paul Cezanne 1839-1906 Bequeathed by Sir Hugh Walpole 1941
Figure 3: Still Life with Water Jug c.1892-3 Paul C?zanne 1839-1906 Bequeathed by C. Frank Stoop 1933
Tate. 2020. ‘Still Life With Water Jug’, Paul Cézanne, C.1892–3 | Tate. [online] Available at: <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/N04725> [Accessed 9 December 2020].
One aspect of tree photography that interests me is the use of multiple images to create a portrait. I explored this during the AGM60 Research & Experimentation module in which I created three multiple exposure shots of a tree then compiled them to create the final image.
My interest was piqued further by the following image by Noel Myles that featured in Into The Woods.
Figure 1: Noel Myles, Fourth Short Film Depicting a Tree from the series Still Films, Winter 2000
“This image was composed in the photographers studio using 187 separate 35mm negatives, taken over a four-week period. It explores the idea that many negatives may comprise one photograph. Myles’ study extends beyond one viewpoint and one moment in time, acting more like a film than traditional photography. More than any single exposure, it also perhaps more accurately reflects the constantly changing life of the tree.”
(Barnes, M. 2019, pp. 136).
When I explored Myles’ work further I came across some information that sparked a new line of enquiry.
“In addition, his landscapes extend beyond one viewpoint and one moment in time, acting perhaps more like film than traditional photography. For the artist, this technique serves to evoke memories and accumulated experiences. [2008].”
(Fourth Short Film Depicting a Tree, Winter | Myles, Noel | V&A Search the Collections, 2020)
In addition, I discovered that Myles has since made his compound images using both Black & White and colour.
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
The following has been extracted from the website of Lumas, an organisation who sells artwork on behalf of the photographer. I’ve kept the full text intact as it provides a lot of useful information and references:
“The protruding sections lend the image a physical presence: It emerges into the room. By juxtaposing black & white and colour shots taken at different times of the year, the artist produces a symbolic circle of life. The dynamic energy of the mosaic is accentuated through its three-dimensional appearance. The multi-layered work becomes an artistic entanglement of different elements of time and space, “tangible” in every sense of the word.”
Multiple Art Trees
The mind is not a camera. And the still life trees created in large-format by British artist Noel Myles do not capture moments or, at least, should not be seen to. While they consist of a large number of smaller photographs, these photographs are brought together to create one overall image Myles, who actually trained as an illustrator and painter, creates his collages using classic analogue photography, but contrasts the traditional single perspective of a photograph with the multiple perspectives created by the collage. What we see is a tree, a tree comprised of multiple close-ups, taken over a number of seasons. Individual details are photographed from below, from the side, from up close, and from a distance. This technique allows Myles to revolutionise the fleeting moment of perception captured by classical photography into a more comprehensive impression of time and space. The result is that we, the observer, are forced ask ourselves certain questions. What is nature? What does a tree really mean to us? It is not just a structure that has grown organically, in which every detail stands in relation to the whole, but also an experience of the senses. Just like Myles’s images themselves. The difference is that he uses only photography – a medium of instant impressions – to create this immersion of the senses.
(Reisner, S. 2020)
In addition to the above, I will be researching Myles’ work further in relation to this link and the information available.
Another photographer who uses the compound method is James Balog, an environmental photographer whose focus is on humanity’s modification of nature. I discovered Balog’s work recently when researching how to improve my photography of trees.
The work of Balog’s that caught my eye was his majestic compound images of trees. Similar to the work of Terry Evans and Noel Myles, Balog uses multiple images to depict a single tree as a portrait.
Figure 5
Figure 6
Figure 7
James Balog, selected images featured in Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest, 2004
Balog spent six years photographing North America’s largest, oldest and strongest trees that resulted in the book Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest (2004). At the time of writing, I have ordered this book and was eagerly awaiting its arrival.
Balog originally built enormous portrait studios beneath the canopies of the forest. This aspect reminds me of the work of Myoung Ho Lee. In 2000, Balog invented his own method of compound photography. This involved photographing these massive trees in segments from top to bottom then compose these segments resulting in a portrait. By doing so, Balog has captured each tree in its entirety instead of just showing parts.
To give an idea of Balog’s method, the following is in his own words:
“Eventually, I started what became a four-year-long process—gruelling, dangerous, uncomfortable, and expensive—of figuring out how to climb the trees, rappel down and shoot them as enormous mosaics. The finished composites took hundreds, then thousands, of frames. Hard work, like I said. Yet the approach was satisfying beyond my wildest dreams when it created fresh new ways of engaging with these greatest of arboreal citizens on our continent.”
(Balog, J. 2020)
According to Balog’s website these images:
“Stand as an artistic and symbolic reassembling of the continent’s long-lost primeval forests. Across the globe, the planet’s original tree cover has been altered so dramatically that we no longer remember what made nature natural.”
Was this the inspiration I was looking for?
Images
Figure 1: Noel Myles, Fourth Short Film Depicting a Tree from the series Still Films, Winter 2000
Figure 2: Noel Myles Oak No 1 2016
Figure 3: Noel Myles Still Film of an Oak at Wormingford No 7 2011
Figure 4: Noel Myles Third Film of the three trees No 1 2010 2011
Figure 5: Eastern White Pine, Lenox, Massachusetts, October 2002, from TREE: A New Vision of the American Forest. James Balog.
Figure 6: American elm, Buckley, Michigan, November 2000, from TREE: A New Vision of the American Forest. James Balog.
Figure 7: Live Oak tree named “Angel Oak,” Johns Island, South Carolina, April 2001, from TREE: A New Vision of the American Forest. James Balog.
Jennie Meadows MA Photography 